The Millions Top Ten: July 2022

We spend plenty of time here at 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 July.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	2.	The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook	6 months
2.	6.	Refuse to Be Done	4 months
3.	5.	How High We Go in the Dark	4 months
4.	7.	Either/Or	2 months
5.	8.	Sea of Tranquility	3 months
6.	–	The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories	1 month
7.	10.	Forbidden City	2 months
8.	–	Paradais	1 month
9.	–	Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace	1 month
10.	–	The Tartar Steppe	1 month

Four titles bounced to our Hall of Fame this month: Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition by James Joyce and Eduardo Arroyo (illustrator), The Penguin Modern Classics Book by Henry Eliot, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, and Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen.

This marks Franzen’s fourth trip to our site’s hallowed hall, and for streak spotters out there: it’s his fourth consecutive novel to earn the honor. For the rest of the authors—even Sunny Jim—it’s their first trip each.

Their movements opened four new spots on our list, so this month we welcome The Angel of Rome by Jess Walter, Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace by Yiyun Li, and The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati.

Once again, among a group of four only one of these authors has reached our site’s Hall of Fame: Walter’s Beautiful Ruins made it in 2014. However, shout outs are due to both Jess Walter and Fernanda Melchor whose books were featured in our Great First Half 2022 Book Preview last January. (Yours truly previewed the Melchor…)

Regular Millions readers may also recall last year’s interview with Yiyun Li about 85 Days, a War and Peace-based and pandemic-inspired reading project. More esoteric Millions readers might just recall one of Li’s best lines from it: “I … need a big book in my daily reading. It’s sort of like your daily bread, right? We can eat oysters and anything else, but the daily bread is War and Peace.”

On the horizon we foresee at least one spot opening next month, so stay tuned and let’s see what it’ll be, and whether it brings company.

This month’s near misses included: The Collected Stories (William Trevor), Pure Colour, Hell of a Book, The Hurting Kind, and Essays One. See Also: Last month’s list.