BTT: Manual labor

It's Booking Through Thursday time again.

This week's question:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I am a big fan of these types of books, and use them a lot professionally for my day job. My favourites are:
- Macquarie Dictionary
- Fowler's Use of Modern English
- Thesaurus (Rogets is still the best)
- Australian Government Style Guide (which has excellent simple explanations of grammatical rules, along with all the official style guff).

As for writing guides, a US editor many years ago recommended to me Self-editing for fiction writers by Renni Browne and Dave King (available on Amazon), and it taught me an enormous amount about the mechanics of storytelling.

It's not a "how to write" book, but rather an editing checklist, covering topics including point of view, proportion, characterisation and exposition etc. It's a fantastic tool for anyone writing fiction (and is pretty much the sort of thing manuscript assessors and editors focus on).