Is Reading Easier in 2012?

A novelist friend laughingly told me about getting lost a while back while reading -- but not lost in the book. Lost outside of it. She found a reference to the Seven Years' War and because she wasn't sure what that conflict was (it pitted most of Europe's major powers against each other from 1756-63), she set her book down and went to her Mac to Google it.



Online, she jumped from one intriguing website to another, ranging further and further afield from the French and Indian War, to Frederick...