The Millions Top Ten: October 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 October.

This Month	Last Month		Title	On List
1.	1.		Less	6 months
2.	2.		The Overstory	5 months
3.	3.		Lost Empress	6 months
4.	5.		The Incendiaries	3 months
5.	4.		There There	4 months
6.	7.		The Ensemble	4 months
7.	9.		Washington Black	2 months
8.	10.		Transcription	2 months
9.	–		Warlight	3 months
10.	–		Killing Commendatore	1 month

Only the lightest, feather soft jostling on the top half of our list this month, as R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries trades places with Tommy Orange’s There There. From there, things get more interesting. First, two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. It’s the first time either author has had the honor, and this move freed up two new spaces on the list.

One of those spaces was filled by Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, which rejoins our rankings in ninth position after taking a one-month hiatus.

The other space was filled by Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, which our own Hannah Gersen described as a “new novel … about a freshly divorced painter who moves to the mountains, where he finds an eerie and powerful painting called ‘Killing Commendatore.’” Of course, when it comes to Murakami, simple descriptions belie subtle unsettlement. “Mysteries proliferate,” Gersen continues, “and you will keep reading—not because you are expecting resolution but because it’s Murakami, and you’re under his spell.”

Of the five “near misses” this month, four appeared in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview. The Practicing Stoic, which did not, is Ward Farnsworth’s “idiosyncratic, strange, yet convincing and useful volume,” according to Ed Simon, offering a novel corrective to the popular understanding of Stoicism. “The Practicing Stoic is one of many philosophical self-help books, contending with the primordial question: ‘How am I to live?’” Simon continues as he situates it within the context of several others in the canon. Additionally, Stoicism itself proves valuable in how it “help[s] us cope with the ever-mounting anxieties of postmodernity, the daily thrum of Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, the queasy push notifications and the indignities of being a cog in the shaky edifice of late capitalism (or whatever).”

Next month two more spots should open on our list for two newcomers, and there’s only one way to find out which.

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

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