As you’ve probably noticed from the new byline attached to the review of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land that I posted earlier today, we’ve been joined by a new contributor at The Millions. Noah is an old friend of mine whose book reviews have appeared in a handful of publications, and I’m glad to have him aboard.
Welcome Noah
Welcome Minnesota Public Radio Listeners!
If you’re arriving here because of my appearance on Midmorning, welcome! By way of a little background, I started The Millions in early 2003 when I was a bookseller at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles. I’ve since moved on from there, but the blog has stuck around. We now have several contributors besides me, and we write daily about books and other cultural topics.Regarding the topic of today’s show, you can read some additional thoughts of ours in these posts.Bandaids for Broken Book SectionsThe Era of the Trusted Fellow ReaderAuthority, an Anniversary, and Book ReviewingWe also suggest that you take a look at our Book Review Index, which includes all the reviews ever penned for The Millions by both our regular contributors and our many, many guests. The reviews range from our longest considerations, to our briefest squibs, to appreciations and ruminations. And don’t miss our Year in Reading, our end-of-the-year series for which we asked dozens of well-known writers and bloggers to tell us about the best book they read all year.Finally, if you like what you see here, please bookmark the site or subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks!Update: A link to listen to the segment should be up at the MPR site soon (I went on around minute 35). If you heard the segment, let us know what you thought. Leave a comment below.
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Goodbye to Chicago, Hiatus at The Millions
After nearly two years in Chicago, we’re picking up and moving again. For the rest of the summer, we’ll be in temporary digs in Maryland until we find ourselves a place in our as yet undetermined final destination. Packing is going much better this time around. We didn’t wait until two days before to get started; there’s no storage unit involved; we’re not getting married in a month; and we don’t have to go halfsies on a rental truck. We’re also driving a fraction of the distance, a measly 696 miles according to Google Maps, though I’ll be behind the wheel of the rental truck this time around as we watch Chicago get smaller in the rearview mirror.Ah, Chicago, I don’t think we ever fell in love with it the way did LA, but it served as an excellent weigh point on our long journey from the West coast back to the East, where we both grew up. I will miss a few things, though. Chicago has a magnificent skyline that I never tired of looking at. Along the same lines, Lake Shore Drive is an incredible road, flanked on each side by Chicago’s two great wonders, its architecture and Lake Michigan. I’ll also miss the weather here. After four years of no weather in LA, the weather here was a great entertainment, from blizzards to thunderstorms. I did a lot of walking in Chicago (at times in the weather conditions just mentioned), and I’ll miss that too, along with my rides on Chicago’s rickety “L,” which is both charming and frustrating in its rickety unreliability, but it’s certainly the only public transit system I’ve ever seen that offers such a great view.Sure there was some bad stuff about the place. After getting used to freewheeling, progressive LA, Chicago, big city though it is, felt a little slow and, dare I say it, unenlightened. At the same time, since I was immersed in a rigorous graduate program, and Mrs. Millions was working hard to pay the bills (thank you!), I will leave here knowing that I never appreciated the place as much as I could have.But, alas, it’s time to move on. Accordingly, there won’t be much posting here for the next couple of weeks. In fact, it’s possible that the site will go completely dark until July, but do not be alarmed. I’ll be back soon enough.Housekeeping Note: To those who send me catalogs/books/other random stuff, my Chicago address is no longer valid, so please don’t use it any more. Since I’m going to be at a temporary address for a bit, I don’t have a new address to share, but as soon as I get one, I’ll put a note here, and I’ll let people know by email. Thanks!
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Welcome Anne
Join us in welcoming our newest regular contributor at The Millions:Anne K. Yoder is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is the former books editor of KGB Bar Lit, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, BlackBook, and PopMatters. She moonlights as a pharmacist in the West Village.You may remember the two pieces Anne penned for us recently. Her next offering will be up shortly.
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The Millions Turns Two
March 24, was The Millions’ second birthday. In the year since my last “happy birthday” post, blogs have become firmly mainstream. It’s become difficult to find a person who asks the once common question, “What’s a blog?” The book blog world has become amazingly robust in the last year, meriting frequent mentions in the mainstream media and providing a real alternative to newspaper book coverage that manages, at best, to reach some of the readers some of the time. Based on the many emails I get, book blogs have become a venue of conversation (and a potential outlet for promotion) for authors and publishers. For those who bemoan the stagnation of the literary world – and all of the book bloggers seem to do it from time to time – we are in the midst of a shift, if not yet a revolution, in national (and international) literary discussion, which has migrated from book club meetings and bookstore aisles out into the open. I am regularly delighted when a Millions reader, and book lover, leaves a comment or sends me an email, thus entering the conversation. I also love the loose give and take among the several dozen book blogs and the way themes will propagate across the blog landscape one after another until there is a dense web of conversation floating among us in the ether. The best thing about this is it appears to be just the beginning. I have ten times as many regular visitors as I did at this time a year ago, and new book blogs appear almost weekly it seems, adding further depth to the discourse. When I started, I just figured it might be fun to write about books as a way to make use of all the time I spent surrounded by them at the bookstore. Everything that’s happened beyond that has been gravy. Thanks for two great years, Millions readers (and contributors)!
The Welcome Wagon
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.
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The Millions at BEA (X3)
I know that last year I expressed profound ambivalence about attending BEA, but in the end I’ve decided to go this year for a few reasons: It’s in NYC, giving me the opportunity to see the numerous family and friends I have there; I’ll get to meet up with some of the many cool people I met last year; Millions contributors Garth and Noah, NYC natives, will be along for the ride.So, with that out of the way, let me tell you where we’ll be. The Millions and many other litbloggers and literary luminaries will be at Kettle of Fish on 59 Christopher St. Thursday (tomorrow) from 8-11pm for the Litblog Co-op party. Come by and say hi.The rest of our schedule, as best I can tell, is fairly wide open, but if there’s an event we should know about, email me to let us know.
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The Millions on the Radio
I just got off the phone with Liane Hansen of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. The show asked me to be a part of their Summer Reading series, which asks a guest each week what they’ve been reading, what they’ll read next, and what they’d read if they had all the time in the world. Hopefully, I don’t sound too nervous (it was my first time on the radio – a little nerve-wracking). But if you want to tune in, it’ll be on midway through the show’s second hour tomorrow. The segment will be posted on their website as well, so I’ll post a link here after it airs.Update: You can now listen to the segment online if you missed it on the radio.
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