You may have gone to Resources, my list of links to various sources of information (and timeless tracts) that are available on the web. I am a frequent visitor.

I am also a frequent visitor to the row of books that sits on a shelf above my computer. The books are arrayed roughly by subject but also (for aesthetic reasons) in “waves” by height (peak-trough-peak-through-peak). Here, from left to right, are the titles on my reference shelf (with links to editions that are available online):

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, Edwin Meese III (chairman of the editorial advisory board)
The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions, Kermit L. Hall (editor)
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
The Great Thoughts, George Seldes (editor)
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America (published by the U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1972)
The Constitution of the United States of America (footnoted version “presented by” Emmanuel Celler, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives, GPO, 1972)
Layman’s Guide to Individual Rights under the United States Constitution (prepared by the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committe on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate, GPO, 1972)
FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, Jim Powell
The Law, Frederic Bastiat
The Constitution of the United States of America (“presented by” Wayne Hays, chairman of the Committee on House Administration, GPO, 1972)
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America (pocket version published by Cato Institute)
The Summing Up, W. Somerset Maugham
The Great Quotations, George Seldes (editor)
The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form
The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions (prepared and published by the Board of Governors, 1961)
The King’s English, H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler (revised by Sir Ernest Gowers)
Modern American Usage: A Guide, Wilson Follett
A Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press
Legal Problem Solver (a Reader’s Digest compendium)
Know Your Rights (a Reader’s Digest compendium)
The Timetables of History, Bernard Grun
The Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present (prepared by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1976)
Relativity Visualized, Lewis Carroll Epstein
Amo, Amas, Amat and More: How to Use Latin to Your Own Advantage and to the Astonishment of Others, Eugene Ehrlich
Dictionary of Foreign Terms, C.O. Sylvester Mawson
Webster’s New World French Dictionary (concise edition)
21st Century Dictionary of Acronyms and Abbreviations, Diana Ajian (compiler)
The Complete Plain Words, Sir Ernest Gowers
Harbrace College Handbook, John C. Hodges and Mary E. Whitten
Handbook of Mathematical Tables and Formulas, Richard Stevens Burington (compiler)
A Guide to American English, L.M. Myers
Principles of Speech, Alan H. Monroe
The Macmillan Handbook of English, John M. Kierzek and Walker Gibson
The 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Robert Byrne
The Plain English Approach to Business Writing, Edward P. Bailey Jr.
The Art of Literary Research, Richard D. Altick
The Basic Patterns of Plot, Foster-Harris
Written Words: A Literary Introduction to English Composition, Arthur Norman and Lewis Sawin

I have many other reference works in other parts of my house. Those listed above just happen to be the ones at hand. I would be grateful for suggestions about other titles that I should keep handy.

I am reading The Sea, by John Banville — one of my favorite authors. The Sea won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, an honor justly deserved. Last night, I read (and re-read) a paragraph that exemplifies Banville’s command of language and ability to paint word-pictures:

I wonder if other people when they were children had this kind of image, at once vague and particular, of what they would be like when they grew up. I am not speaking of hopes and aspirations, vague ambitions, that kind of thing. From the outset I was very precise and definite in my expectations. I did not want to be an engine driver or a famous explorer. When I peered wishfully through the mists from the all too real then to the blissfully imagined now, this is, as I have said, exactly how I would have foreseen my future self, a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition sitting in a room just like this one, in my sea-captain’s chair, leaning at my little table, in just this season, the year declining toward its end in clement weather, the leaves scampering, the brightness imperceptibly fading from the days and the street lamps coming on only a fraction earlier each evening. Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

Here in central Texas we have been enjoying unseasonably warm temperatures for a month or so. Daytime highs aren’t in the 100s, but they’re close. I’m not complaining; I enjoy the persistently sunny and dry weather, and the relatively low humidity that accompanies it. For those of you who have been experiencing similar weather but are less enamored of it than I am, here’s a poem that might cause you to bless the bright, blazing Sun:

The Cremation of Sam McGee
By Robert Service (1874-1958)

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
“It’s the cursèd cold, and it’s got right hold, till I’m chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet ’tain’t being dead — it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”

A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: “You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you, to cremate those last remains.”

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows — Oh God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared — such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.
I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”; … then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear, you’ll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

(Source: Poem of the Week)

A self-description by the spinster, librarian narrator of Jincy Willett’s novel, Winner of the National Book Award:

You escape, said Abe Marx, into your books. I didn’t have the wit then, quite, for the obvious riposte: I escape, when I feel the need, into what all you bullies insist is reality. I study birds, library patrons, local politicians. Sometimes I garden. Sometimes I watch the Sox. Sometimes I drink. I keep a neat house and I pay my taxes, all in the real world. But I don’t live there.

She speaks for me.