Reference Books Need Love Too

A zippy little post about the reference books I’ve used the most in my life. Not everything can be a New York Times Bestseller.

The University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary 4th Edition – The edition here is key. After high school, I picked up the fifth edition. Don’t care for it. It’s far more textbook-ish. In the fourth edition, in addition a basic explanation of the varying pronunciation of Spanish depending upon region, the middle of the dictionary contains a pretty vast list of idioms and proverbs. Any language student can tell you that proverbs/idioms make ZERO sense in direct translation nearly every time. Having that table makes it far easier for someone who wants to sound like a native speaker than someone who wants to sound like a good Spanish student. Fourth Edition for life!

501 Spanish Verbs – It has 501 Spanish verbs. Doesn’t sound exciting, but let me tell you…it isn’t. Doesn’t mean it’s not super helpful. The book also shows the entire conjugation table for all the verbs.

Far East English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary – This book will save your life. Linguistically. If you’re taking Chinese. The biggest plus to this dictionary is the ability to find Chinese characters by English translation, base radical, or pronunciation. You can even guess at a character’s radical, since there is a special index breaking radicals down by stroke count. If you speak/read Chinese, the English half will given an example of the character in a short sentence/saying. If you’re looking for Chinese characters, each one will be followed by a few common usages of the character. This is incredibly helpful in situations like “to wipe, scrub, polish” is its own verb, but the entry also shows the character to add to make “eraser”. I’ll give everyone a minute to calm down (and order their copy of this dictionary) before continuing. Only so much excitement folks can take at once.

The Florida Keys: A History & Guide – Written by Joy Williams, this is actually 1/2 reference, 1/2 prose. While Williams has a book that will guide you around the Keys and give you some behind-the-scenes history, it is written with a highly entertaining tone of how little she wants you there. This book oozes a disdain for the tourism that both is the Keys and is destroying the Keys at the same time. It is well written, flows nicely, and will leave you with a bit of a guilt trip if you ever acted like the tourist the Joy Williams hates. If you are from Florida, going to Florida, or dislike tourists, read this books.

The Blue Guide to Indiana – Michael Martone wrote this book. It’s hilarious, but unlike Williams’ book above, this was quite obviously a humorous prose written with some travel reference in mind. My copy is signed, but Martone misspelled my name. Kind of a trade off. Read it for great humor, but not quite a reference book. Didn’t mean to kill the mood’ we’ll move on.

Country Wisdom Almanac – This is just fun. It’s like one of those “How to Survive the Apocalypse” books, but folksy. Random tips from random page openings: How to test your dog for food allergies. Tying a quilt. Homemade ballpark mustard. Construct a barrel composter. Identify timber trees. Amazing. Why haven’t you already bought this instead of reading about it?!