The Millions Top Ten: November 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 November.

This Month	Last Month		Title	On List
1.	2.		The Overstory	6 months
2.	7.		Washington Black	3 months
3.	5.		There There	5 months
4.	4.		The Incendiaries	4 months
5.	6.		The Ensemble	5 months
6.	–		The William H. Gass Reader	4 months
7.	8.		Transcription	3 months
8.	10.		Killing Commendatore	2 months
9.	–		Severance	1 month
10.	–		The Golden State	1 month

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction has reached our site’s Hall of Fame each year that the site has operated, and this month the trend continues with the ascension of Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. Joining it on that voyage is Sergio De La Pava’s Lost Empress, marking the second time De La Pava’s earned the honor since Garth Risk Hallberg profiled him back in 2012. We ran another long interview with the author earlier this year.

Meanwhile Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight has once again dropped out of our Top Ten. In the past four months it’s been on, off, on and off, flickering like a candle that can’t quite stay lit.

With three fresh spots, we welcome three newcomers to the list.

All 928 pages of The William H. Gass Reader hold sixth position, and the book enters our ranks at an appropriate time. When better than the winter, asked our own Nick Ripatrazone, to appreciate the author of “a wild, wacky horror story about snow that deserves to be rediscovered, appreciated — and, instead of Joyce — tweeted, as the snow falls upon all the living and the dead”? Nick went on to enumerate his thoughts on Gass’s work, and its transformative effects.

In the ninth spot, we find Severance, Ling Ma’s “funny, frightening, and touching debut,” which our own Adam O’Fallon Price called “a bildungsroman, a survival tale, and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book” in his teaser for our Great 2018 Book Preview. Ma has since contributed to our ongoing Year in Reading series, recommending a newly reprinted novella first published in 1982. To find out which, you’ll have to read the entry for yourself.

Finally, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling’s novel The Golden State makes its first appearance on our Top Ten. As of this writing, four Year in Reading participants have included the book in their lists: Angela Garbes, Edan Lepucki, Lauren Wilkinson, and Crystal Hana Kim. (They won’t be the last.) “It was one of several books I read that also complicate the conventional ways we view and talk about motherhood,” Garbes wrote. “The novel’s anxiety-laced vulnerability, its at once mundane and urgent first person narration, was a revelation,” Lepucki added.

Next month’s list should be shaken up quite a bit by the rest of the Year in Reading series, which reliably bloats everyone’s “to read” piles just in time for the New Year.

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

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