Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book (DaCapo), ed. by Sean Manning

In his forward for Bound to Last, Ray Bradbury recalls the aunt who lent him an Edgar Allan Poe collection and the enormous influence it had on his vocation as a writer. Most of the essayists gathered in this slender volume are of younger generations and speak of particular books as memory chestsnot just the words themselves but the tactile nature of books, their dog-eared covers, creased pages and underlined sentences. “Certain books should only exist as e-books,” proposes poet Nick Flynn. These are books that are “merely informational” and “whose writers forgot that language is a plastic material, that the book is sculptural.”