The Millions Top Ten: March 2021

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 March.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	1.	A Swim in a Pond in the Rain	3 months
2.	2.	White Ivy	5 months
3.	3.	Fake Accounts	2 months
4.	–	Klara and the Sun	1 month
5.	8.	The Copenhagen Trilogy	3 months
6.	6.	Detransition, Baby	3 months
7.	4.	The Silence	6 months
8.	5.	Dune: Book 1	5 months
9.	9.	No One Is Talking About This	2 months
10.	7.	What Are You Going Through	6 months

Let’s get right to it: basically nothing changed this month. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun jumped into the space that Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga left open. Two books reversed positions: Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy swapped eighth position for fifth, which had previously been held by Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Otherwise? Less movement than the Ever Given.

That’s OK, though. Especially in a year when few of us have moved much more than that. This might be the inhalation before the stretch, the huff before the sprint. If the Top Ten is the country at large, then the pairs of five- and six-month books on it—books poised to hit our Hall of Fame soon, opening spots as they do—are dormant cicadas, ready to transform the late spring and summer into something wholly different from what we have now. That’s soon.

Or perhaps a comparison more apt would be this: if the March Top Ten is all of us, huddled and yearning to breathe (mask) free, then ramping up vaccination rates are going to free things up sooner than later, and movement will only follow.

Respite is coming. Will reading? See you next month to check in.

This month’s near misses included: Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology, Outlawed, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, and A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself. See Also: Last month’s list.

Bonus Links:
—A Year in Reading: Sigrid Nunez
—Bird Brain: Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and the Literature of Twitter
—The Novel Still Exists: The Millions Interviews Don DeLillo
—A Year in Reading: Lauren Oyler
—George Saunders and the Question of Greatness
—Kazuo Ishiguro and the Inescapable Perils of the Internet
—Panel Mania: ‘Dune: The Graphic Novel’