What's the best Christmas present you've ever received? One lonely Christmas - stuck in New York City and unable to get home to Alabama to see her family - Harper Lee spent the holiday with friends... and received a Christmas gift that would end up being a present to the entire literary world. In the short story "Christmas to Me" (McCall's Magazine, 1961), Lee writes about her experience:

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The English language is a wonderful thing. For a whistle stop tour through it's 1500 year (or thereabouts) history, sit back and enjoy The History of English in 10 Minutes produced by Britain's Open University:

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Did you know...

1. Amazon's $34 billion annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world.
2. Amazon's web sales are five times the combined web sales of Walmart, Target and Buy.com.
3. Amazon serves 137 million customers a week, 33% more than voted in the 2010 USA elections. That's 19.5 million customers daily - equal to the population of Beijing, or the number of Americans who live on less than $6000 a year.
4. The average amount brought in by one of Amazon's unique users is $189. That's almost five times as valuable as Ebay's average ($39).
5. Amazon owns 1/10th of North America's e-commerce pie.
6. If Amazon's active users were a country, their population would be twice that of Canada.
7. With 50,000 preorders, Kindle Fire is set to double the launch of the iPad.
8. Amazon's current cloud platform could store 82 books for each person on the earth.
9. Amazon's warehouse space has grown from a 400 square foot garage in 1995 to 25 million square feet - equivalent to more than 700 Madison Square Gardens.

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When I was a kid I brought home a paperback book that my parents didn't think I should read. Mind you, this was during an era when our neighborhood drugstore's book racks never sported anything but the most innocuous (by today's standards) sorts of pulp fiction, from detective stories to romance novels to true crime. So you can be assured that my selection was about as tame as, say, a Disney animated movie. But it had a lurid cover photo and a rather suggestive title, suggestive, at least, to my 12-year-old sensibilities. Also to my mom because when she spotted it on my nightstand she freaked. She asked my dad to speak to me about it and confiscate the book.

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Congratulations to Alan Hollinghurst for his UK National Book Award win. The Stranger's Child, which was controversially omitted from this year's Man Booker shortlist, won him the Author of the Year Award at last Friday's Galaxy National Book Awards.

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Looking for a crafty gift idea for a book lover - how about about a pair of bookends?

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