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 August.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. | Klara and the Sun | 6 months | |
| 2. | 3. |  |
The Copenhagen Trilogy | 6 months |
| 3. | 4. |  |
The Great Mistake | 3 months |
| 4. | 5. |  |
Subdivision | 4 months |
| 5. | – |  |
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | 1 month |
| 6. | 6. |  |
Outlawed |
5 months |
| 7. | – |  |
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois | 1 month |
| 8. | – |  |
Ghost Forest | 1 month |
| 9. | 7. |  |
Women and Other Monsters | 4 months |
| 10. | 9. |  |
The House on Vesper Sands | 2 months |
Our own Ed Simon wrote that “the idiosyncratic contours” of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s mind were on full display in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The work, “scribbl[ed] away as incendiary explosions echoed across the Polish countryside and mustard gas wafted over fields of corpses,” Simon continues, “is less the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century than it is one of the most immaculate volumes of modernist poetry written in the past hundred years.”
It’s also the newest addition to our site’s Top Ten, because if there’s one thing Millions readers evidently love, it’s “one of the oddest books in the history of logic.” This month, the fifth spot belongs to all of you.
Elsewhere on our list, we opened three spots because Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts graduated to our Hall of Fame while Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed both dropped out.
After Wittgenstein, those spots are presently occupied by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest. The two novels, published in August and July, respectively, were featured in our Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview, where Jianan Qian wrote previews for both.
Writing of Love Songs, Qian wrote:
In her ambitious fiction debut, the 2020 National Book Award-nominated poet meditates on African-American history from the colonial slave trade to our current, turbulent age.
…and of Ghost Forest:
This is a fascinating epic of a Chinese-Canadian family, heartbreaking, daring, and relieving.
Solid picks, both. Stay tuned next month to see at least two newcomers, and to find out whether Wittgenstein endures.
This month’s near misses included: Nightbitch, Something New Under the Sun, and Intimacies. See Also: Last month’s list.
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Source : The Millions Top Ten: August 2021
