Welcome Noah

I can't believe it's been three years, but it's true. I started The Millions three years ago today (though it didn't become a Blog About Books until a little later.) Want to see what it looked like? Ugly! In the intervening years I've tried to make the blog a little nicer to look at and a little easier to read. I'm still having fun though, and I wouldn't have kept it up for this long (I've never kept anything up this long!), if it weren't for you guys. So thank you. Thank you to my contributors who keep this place from being too monotonous. Thank you to all those folks in the publishing industry who work hard to get good books out there to the people and who are kind enough to occasionally send me books they think I might like. Thank you to writers and aspiring writers for creating things for us to read (and for visiting The Millions sometimes). Thanks to my fellow book bloggers - if it weren't for you guys, this would be a pretty dull hobby. Thanks most of all to the readers of this blog and the readers of books. I've greatly enjoyed our ongoing, virtual conversation.All those thank yous. One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can publicly pretend you've just won an Oscar any time you feel like it.Finally, I just want to harken back to my so-called manifesto from way back when, when I laid out why I think it's important for us to discuss what we read. It's still my goal for the blog today: "Given that you and I will only be able to read a finite number of books in our lifetimes, then we should try, as much as possible, to devote ourselves to reading only the ones that are worth reading, while bearing in mind that for every vapid, uninspiring book we read, we are bumping from our lifetime reading list a book that might give us a profound sort of joy."Keep reading good books!

You may have noticed that a few days ago I added another newsfeed to the sidebar. This one provides book headlines from the Christian Science Monitor. I'm pretty excited about this because the Monitor happens to be one of my favorite newspapers. The paper's interesting history sets it apart from most dailies. Despite its name, the Monitor is not a religious paper. It was founded by Mary Baker Eddy, a devotee of the Christian Science religion, in 1908, but it was not meant to be a religious organ. Eddy was a prominent Boston citizen, and she had been getting a lot of grief from Joseph Pulitzer and his newspaper the New York World. She created the paper because she was convinced that newspapers should do more than attack people. She wanted her paper "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." The result is consistently excellent journalism with a great international focus and a deeper insight into the news than most daily papers provide. Have a look at the paper here.Tomorrow is one of the biggest literary days of the year: the announcement of the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Speculation abounds.

The Millions is six years old today. We're another year deeper, and as in past years it seems an appropriate moment for reflection.Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the shape and format of what we do here. The Millions is ostensibly a blog, a publishing format that seems to have had a brief heyday around 2005. Prior to that, blogging was maligned as some sort of barely human form of discourse, the rantings of madmen and -women or the laughably amateur efforts of the idle or obsessive.Gradually, the form matured, and was adopted and institutionalized in many corners. For The Millions, maturing meant bringing on regular contributors and working with publishers and publicists to wrangle interviews with and essays by notable writers. It also meant thinking of ourselves as a legitimate (even "mainstream") publication.But now, suddenly, blogging is feeling a little old-fashioned. First Facebook, then Twitter and Tumblr, have fetishized brevity and broadcasting, leaving blogs looking ponderous and even insular by comparison.There is, no doubt, huge value in these tools. Facebook and Twitter offer connectivity, though with built-in limitations to communication. And add Tumblr to the mix and you have three incredible tools for filtering, or, as it is sometimes better better termed, curation.In the vast wildness of the internet, we rely on curators. Some people are very good at it. There are also algorithmic curation tools and community-driven curation tools, though their output tends to be robotic in the case of the former and reflective of a form of self-reinforcing mass peer pressure in the latter. Meanwhile, through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more prosaic means like email and chat, our friends and "friends" curate for us, shooting links our way to make us laugh or think.We do some curation here too. Over the last year we've regimented our "Curiosities" posts, with all of our regulars providing links, making for a curious weekly mix of goodies from around the web.But much more of our energy is devoted to something else: generating original reviews and essays, some quite short and others very long. Increasingly, it seems, this sets The Millions apart. It dictates that, though there are nine of us, we rarely publish more than one or two items a day. It also means that we tend to have a lot invested in each item we post. We invest time in each piece you see here, but each also bears the promise of The Millions' survival and future growth - the more that people care about what we write, the more The Millions grows. And, of course, the opposite holds true as well.This isn't meant to be rant of any kind. I wanted to bring it up because I value the work that the contributors here do and because I appreciate that all of you out there read it and all the professional and amateur curators who link to it. That is a big part of what makes running The Millions worthwhile.In thinking about all this, I spent some time skimming through The Millions archives of the last year, and while these aren't the longest or most popular or even necessarily the "best" things we've run all year, they are, I think, a worthy sample of what The Millions is all about:This year, Garth cracked wise about novel titles. Garth and Kevin reviewed one of the most talked about books of the year, and later, the book's author made an appearance. We had visits from other illustrious guests, as well. Andrew reviewed a quirky book and wrote about music. And Emily asked, "Why So Serious Batman?" Edan did many a great interview. Garth tried to make sense of tragedy. We did group posts and covered notable literary events and generally offered our own twist on things.Thanks for another great year, Millions readers. We continue to value your intelligence, curiosity, and feedback.

The NYC Walking Tour is this Saturday, May 2nd, and we've got an update to the itinerary and a couple of other notes. First, the itinerary - we have swapped McNally Jackson and Housing Works because Housing Works opens at noon that day. The times listed here are our best guesses, so if you are hoping to meet up with us partway through, keep that in mind. Here is the updated itinerary:11:00 - 11:30: Three Lives (154 West 10th Street at Waverly Place) - we'll meet at Three Lives at 11am.25 minutes walking11:55 - 12:25: McNally Jackson (52 Prince St. between Mulberry and Lafayette)12:30 - 1:00: Around the corner to Housing Works Used Book Cafe (126 Crosby St. between Prince and Houston) Housing Works is generously offering a free cup of coffee from their cafe with the purchase of any book.10 minutes walking1:10 - 1:25: Bluestockings (172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington)1:25 - 2:35: Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (about 3 miles - folks who are daunted by the distance can take the F train from Bluestockings to BookCourt)2:35 - 3:05: BookCourt (163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean)3:15 - whenever: And we'll wrap things up at Freebird Books & Goods (123 Columbia St. between Kane & Degraw), which will host a little backyard party with refreshments.A note on the weather: Right now, the forecast is for "showers." Unless the outlook worsens considerably, we will most likely go ahead with the tour as scheduled on Saturday and brave a few raindrops (if it's bad enough, we can take the F train from Bluestockings to BookCourt instead of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.) I'll post a last update late Friday or early Saturday, and if you want to be sure to get the info, RSVP to [email protected], or join our Facebook group.

We have some exciting news today. I've long pined for the perfect url for The Millions and now we finally have it. From now on, The Millions will reside at www.themillions.com.Long-time readers will know that this is in fact the fourth address that the site has had over the years, but I can assure you that themillions.com will be the last. I think the name befits a site that has long outgrown its "blogspot" roots. Plus, it's very easy to remember.While links to themillionsblog.com will redirect to their themillions.com counterparts indefinitely, we encourage you to update your bookmarks and any links you may have that point to The Millions. We believe that the move has gone smoothly, but if you see anything awry, please let us know. Thanks for your support!Update: No update to your RSS feed subscriptions necessary. RSS subscribers will continue to receive our posts.