Corresponding about books

Just posted Bookworks owner Peter Dast's response to a surveyish thing I was trying to put together on Post.

Earlier this morning, I sent Peter a follow-up email that commiserated a bit re: the reader poll's failure to gain traction, and ask if it would be ok to post his reply outside of the context of the broad bookseller survey originally envisioned. The lightly edited excerpt below references my own e-book wariness, and responds to Peter's question,

For example--as a writer, don't you feel you want or need a nice hardcover copy of Strunk & White, Webster's Second Unabridged, maybe an OED, and old hardcover editions of your favorite essayists or journalists?"

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As a telecommuting writer/blogger whose first real rent-paying piece was for a website, my personal relationship with books is really one that revolves around decompression, and literally unplugging from the day's work. I often stare at one screen or another for much of the day, and wind down by going to bed with a book--usually short stories and essays. I'm guessing an e-book reader with a backlit screen would feel a little too vocational for comfort. I'd rather continue falling asleep with the lights on and waking up with paper cuts on place-holding fingers--or spine imprints on my face.

You invoked a writerly canon of reference materials, so I figured I'd share mine. I haven't graduated from paperback copies of Chicago and AP style manuals, Strunk and White (and rarely, if ever, consult them). The reference books I value and revisit regularly were given to me by friends [as jokes, i.e. a 1930's vocab-building workbook or revolve around hip-hop. I think the most interesting contemporary explorations of the genre are published by writers with one foot in the "blogosphere" and another planted elsewhere (to name a few career lanes of favorites: academia, big box retail, fast food, lock-smithery, magazine writing--even PR), but there are a few texts with staggering historical sweep that I flip through regularly--Can't Stop Won't Stop, Yes Yes Y'all, Hip Hop America, the Vibe History of Hip Hop. I'm ashamed to say I don't own the two books that best embody hip-hop in written form. Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists and Big Book of Racism ARE the concise and contradictory wit, wordplay, humor and outrage that drew me to hip-hop in the first place, and I need to stop checking them out of the library.

Forthcoming posts will visit the stores that remain, for now.