To which I say, "Step back and lick my Balzac, Amazon. We're much more well-read than that."
If you pay any attention at all to these lists -- and since the small percentage of the internet that is neither porn nor Facebook is mostly lists at this point, you can't avoid them -- you'll remember that St. Louis ranked number eight on Central Connecticut State University's list of Most Literate Cities for 2011. The CCSU rankings are based not on book sales by one entity, but on our access to libraries (we were number two in that category) and book stores, of which we have many. St. Louis additionally had one of the highest donor rates in the country for World Book Night.
What I'm saying is that we don't need Amazon to go through the pretense of making this list (which is really just a delivery vector for their suggested summer reading lists) to tell us we read a lot. We're too busy reading to pay attention anyway.
