The Millions Top Ten: May 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 May.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	1.	A Swim in a Pond in the Rain	5 months
2.	4.	Klara and the Sun	3 months
3.	3.	Fake Accounts	4 months
4.	5.	The Copenhagen Trilogy	3 months
5.	6.	No One Is Talking About This	4 months
6.	8.	Detransition, Baby	5 months
7.	10.	Outlawed	2 months
8.	–	Subdivision	1 month
9.	–	Women and Other Monsters	1 month
10.	–	Craft in the Real World	1 month

Three titles from last month’s “near misses” crack this month’s Top Ten: Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon, Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman, and Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. The novel, essays, and book on craft occupy the eighth, ninth, and 10th positions, respectively. Although each one was deftly highlighted in our Great First-Half 2021 Book Preview last January—(Stay tuned for the Second-Half Preview soon!)—Salesses’s “stunning conflagration” is the only one so far to have been properly reviewed on our site.

“I wish I had it with me for the past twenty plus years of navigating writing workshops, both as student and teacher,” wrote Neelanjana Banerjee. “It is a blueprint for a way forward to build better writing programs, and thus a new kind of writer and teacher who can imagine beyond a structure that often hurt them and left them in need of repair.”

The newcomers’ spaces were opened by the ascension of Susie Yang’s White Ivy, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga to our site’s Hall of Fame. On some shelves, freeing up 1,344 pages and replacing them with 736 pages might look strange, but here on our cyberspace shelf we think it looks swell indeed.

Meanwhile, enough of you talked about Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This that it moved from ninth position to fifth in the span of three months. Where will it go next? You’ll have to check back in July to find out.

This month’s near misses included: The Committed, Vernon Subutex, Selected Stories, 1968-1994, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself and Life Among the Terranauts. See Also: Last month’s list.