The Millions Top Ten: December 2018

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 December.

This Month	Last Month		Title	On List
1.	3.		There There	6 months
2.	2.		Washington Black	4 months
3.	4.		The Incendiaries	5 months
4.	9.		Severance	2 months
5.	–		The Friend	1 month
6.	5.		The Ensemble	6 months
7.	6.		The William H. Gass Reader	2 months
8.	–		My Year of Rest and Relaxation	1 month
9.	8.		Killing Commendatore	3 months
10.	7.		Transcription	4 months

The Overstory‘s reign is over, and once again Millions readers have sent a book to our Hall of Fame. It’s the 155th title to reach the Hall since we began counting in 2009, and those books represent a combined 930 months of our readers’ interest. Laid out consecutively instead of concurrently, that’s more than 77 years of reading!

In its place, There There by Tommy Orange assumes supremacy this month, leapfrogging Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black which remains in second. Both books were highly regarded by contributors in our Year in Reading series, in which Tommy Orange himself participated. I’m not saying Millions readers reward authors for publishing in the series but I’m not not saying the same.

Meanwhile two newcomers join this month’s list: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.

Mere weeks ago, Lucia Senesi interviewed Moshfegh for The Millions, and in their wide-ranging discussion about craft and creative output, they also explored the notion of whether “writers or artists really have a gender.” Moshfegh believed so:

I think the female and male minds work very differently in their biology, the way that language has developed over the last how many thousands of years was part of the patriarchal system. Written language is inherently more male logic linearity. Femininity is more in the realm of emotional intelligence and intuition. That’s why it’s very difficult to argue between the gender. Mostly women learn how to argue like a man. So I do think that writers, maybe it’s different for visual artists, whatever everybody’s brain is different, but I do think that women writers have a different experience and sensibility than male writers, because by their very nature. I think maybe part of this whole movement for equality try to suggest that we are the same, which we are not. The work we need to do is to learn how to value both genders for the things that they’re given us.

Like There There, The Friend, which won this year’s National Book Award, was a darling of our Year in Reading series, drawing praise from seven contributors: Bryan Washington, Ada Limón, Adrienne Celt, Lucy Tan, Anisse Gross, Kamil Ahsan, and our own Anne K. Yoder. For her part, Nunez contributed to the series back in 2010, when the series was only six years old.

This month’s near misses included: Becoming, Milkman, The Practicing Stoic, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month’s list.

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