Over at The Millions, Jesse Ball reviews a year of reading, and makes us want to go buy the book pictured above.

• Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History (Seven Stories Press) “collects the works of outsiders, rebels, and disenfranchised Americans“.

• Over at the Bumpidee Reader, Tobi Vail reviews The Way Home, by George Pelecanos.

• “We are hoping to find organic debris that will teach us what the great man had for dinner.” Says Richard Kemp, of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on the archeological dig of the writers last home.

• Poor Richards Almanack gets a revision.

• Elmore Leonard wins an award, and we learn that “book people are somewhat less glamorous than movie people”.

• You have friends that don’t read?  I guess buy them these books.

• Deckfight gives us their top five books of the decade.

Talks.

• A conversation about art and faith between Alicia Jo Rabins (Girls in Trouble) and David Bazan.

• We Are Champion talks with Gary Lutz. (Thanks The Millions)

• Jason Reitman chats with A.V. Club.

And finally…

• A Kansas City ventriloquist who taught himself Yiddish.