The Millions Top Ten: April 2022

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for April.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	1.	Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition	4 months
2.	2.	The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook	3 months
3.	3.	When We Cease to Understand the World	4 months
4.	5.	The Penguin Modern Classics Book	4 months
5.	4.	The Morning Star	5 months
6.	–	Refuse to Be Done	1 month
7.	7.	These Precious Days: Essays	6 months
8.	–	Crossroads	4 months
9.	–	Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus	6 months
10.	–	How High We Go in the Dark	1 month

By golly, you pulled it off. Millions readers, egged on by our own Ed Simon, purchased enough copies of a hundred-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein book to sustain Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on six separate Top Ten lists. (It should be noted that those lists were non-consecutive: this journey began in August 2021, so it’s taken nine months because it kept popping off the list into the “Near Misses”—only to return weeks later.) It’ll be ten months by the time Wittgenstein’s book reaches our site’s Hall of Fame, but a century after publication, who’s counting? Patience is a virtue, but persistence is a skill.

This month we are also rejoined by Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, which is back on the Top Ten for the first time since the end of 2021. In football, you never count out Tom Brady; in literature, you never count on Jon Franzen.

Meanwhile our list’s true newcomers are Matt Bell and Sequoia Nagamatsu, who join in the sixth and tenth positions for Refuse to Be Done and How High We Go in the Dark, respectively.

Space for all four of these works was opened up by the graduation of four titles to our Hall of Fame. Three cheers for Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, and Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. Each of these authors have been to the Hall of Fame before, but this will be Groff’s third appearance. We began this write-up with persistence, and we end it with reliability.

What will next month bring? As always, there’s only one way to know.

This month’s near misses included: Intimacies, The Magician, Sea of Tranquility, Harlem Shuffle and The Collected Stories (William Trevor). See Also: Last month’s list.