A Summer Schedule

I find it hard to believe, but today is the one year anniversary of The Millions, making this little Blog About Books a veritable ancient in the "blog world." Authoring this blog has been a great experience for me. It turned me from an unmotivated, but ostensibly "aspiring" writer, into someone who writes for an audience every day and can now seriously contemplate life as a writer without much dread. If there's any folks out there who are contemplating a similar sort of writing life, putting together a blog is a great way to get the kinks out, not to mention all the web skills you pick up along the way.When I first started The Millions it wasn't even a blog about books, it was just a... blog. My buddy Derek had had a blog for a while and was really into it. It looked like fun and I was getting tired of trying to muster up the energy to write in my journal each day, so I decided to give it a try. My first post appears to have been about politics, and I think it was my last post about politics. I kind of meandered along like that for a while, writing intermittently about art lectures and rock and roll shows and things like that until one day in the shower, where I have most of my epiphanies, I had an epiphany. A Blog About Books. "I've decided to reinvent The Millions...", I wrote. A manifesto soon followed. And it was followed again and again by more and more manifestos. And of course I went bookfinding and bookspotting. And occasionally people read the blog and they seemed to enjoy it and some of them even left comments or emailed me or asked me a book question. It's been fun. I hope to keep doing it, too. I don't have a lot of readers, 30 to 60 a day, and most of those are family members, but I'm pretty addicted to it. This year brings lots of busyness and lots of changes. I'm getting married, moving, and going back to school, but maybe I'll find the time to make it to The Millions anniversary #2 on March 24th, 2005; you'll have to keep reading to find out.The anniversary might be a good time to post another manifesto, and since I think I may have written a (small) one today in responding to an email from a reader, I might as well put it up here:I lean perhaps too much on the side of being uncritical about books. In fact, I prefer to allow the books I read to be a jumping off point for conversation or to talk about the experience of reading a particular book. I feel like that there is so much qualitative judgment being passed on books (...and music...and movies) that it tends to drown out the other stuff... so I haven't wanted The Millions to add to the din of the review culture. Having said that, I think it IS important to pass qualitative judgment on books, but it is far more important to single out (and try to get people to read) the good ones instead of knocking down the bad ones. I also fear that my usual positivity makes me seem like a corporate shill for Amazon, but I'm hoping that most of my readers aren't so cynical. I just happened to have all of this on my mind since it turns out that today is the one year anniversary of The Millions.Thanks to all you trusted fellow readers!

It's Thanksgiving and we are expecting many guests, so don't expect much blogging. There will be some more "best of the year" type posts as the lists are published in various places. I'm thinking about compiling a master list to see which books appear on the most lists as I did last year... we'll see. In the meantime, some of you may recall my invitation a few weeks back to anyone who would like to contribute to The Millions. And now I am able to happily introduce our first regular guest contributor. Andrew Saikali is an editor in the Globe and Mail newsroom in Toronto and a long-time reader of The Millions. When not listening to Bob Dylan or The Walkmen, he can be found reading. Welcome, Andrew! Stay tuned for his first post, arriving shortly. There are a few other folks in the pipeline right now (you know who you are). And if anyone else would like to contribute to The Millions, drop me line.