In January 1943 Philadelphia’s readers couldn’t get enough of Marcia Davenport’s second novel, The Valley of Decision, and Cecil Brown’s Suez to Singapore, the respective number one fiction and “non-fiction” (when the latter was still a hyphenated compound) bestsellers according to the New York Times, which then reported book sales regionally in a grid format, as pictured. Suez to Singapore is a CBS Radio war correspondent’s account of the sinking of the HMS Repulse in December 1941. Charting today’s New York Times nonfiction bestseller lists--no longer broken down regionally--in hardcover and paperback respectively are conservative TV and talk-radio host Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

A comprehensive study released by the National Endowment for the Arts on November 19 finds that Americans are reading less, and also less well. Key findings include that on average Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, but only seven minutes on leisure reading, and that “reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups.” The NEA’s study--entitled To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence--reports that between 1992 and 2003, “the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.” Click here to review the entire document.

A time to celebrate togetherness like it's 1621 ?

Etymythologies are etymologies that are not factually true but remain popular nonetheless. "[They're] like family anecdotes," writes Ben MacIntyre for the Times. "They may not literally be true; indeed, they may not be true at all; yet they contain a deeper kind of truth." Click here to read MacIntyre's entire article and disabuse yourself of any etymythological confusion regarding the phrase "rule of thumb ," as well as words with fancifully fictitious origins including "marmalade " and "OK ."