Let me warn you -- although I'm stumped by my daughter's 7th grade math homework, I love statistics.

Like the fact that Americans bought 13% more movie tickets last year than they did the year before. That's a huge increase in one year. And to me it's encouraging -- even if some of those tickets were to movies like Treasure Planet and The Hot Chick.

Paintings and sculpture are not doing badly either -- but the new statistic about art prices that really struck me is a slightly wacky one.

The average picture sold at auction during 2002 was physically much bigger than the average painting sold in 2001. And still bigger than the year before.

What can it mean that during just these last two years the average painting increased in size as much as it did during the whole decade of the 1990s?

That large-scale contemporary art is making its way more and more through the auction pipeline? Or that Americans right now simply have a taste for the super-sized? Gigantic McDonald's French fry servings, Gigantic SUVs, why not great big art too?

So Hollywood and the art business are flourishing…but another sector of the culture is definitely not -- that's book publishing. The country seems to be abandoning books.

And this is no one-year blip, either. According to a new set of statistics, Americans are buying millions and millions fewer books now than we did just a few years ago. Younger Americans especially, people between 25 and 39 years old, are cutting back on book-buying even more.

Even worse, the number of benighted households that never buy any book has increased steadily during these last few years -- it's now up to 44%.

But at least, theoretically, some of those people check out books from their libraries. Which brings me to the most depressing new book-publishing statistic: people aren't just buying fewer books, they are reading them less, too.

In 1996, the average American spent 2 and a half hours a week reading books -- but today that average is down to around just two hours a week.

I love movies. I like a lot of television. And I'm afraid I sometimes go weeks without cracking a book myself…it's a lot easier to sit in front of a movie or the TV set and just be…served. But every time I plunge into a book I really like, I'm reminded what a splendid and singular experience reading a good book is.

A book can be as immersive as any video game, and has the power to alter my consciousness -- to provoke fresh, complicated emotions and understandings of the world--in ways that simply nothing else can.

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