Your comment about the L’Engle book holds for a lot of things. But then again, I know I always find it weird when I see characters on supernatural TV shows (like Buffy for example) using the internet to research demons and the like! For some things there should only be books!

I’ve even mostly stopped reading and buying non-fiction books because I read so much non-fiction in the form of articles and blog posts online…but that might be another subject altogether.

What really drove home to me the demise of reference books was rereading L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet. While one of the characters (that would be Charles Wallace) is off travelling through time, the others are scrambling to look up relevant information — obscure dates and places — in various old books. Their search made perfect sense the first time I read it, but now it keeps throwing me out of the story. Sigh.

I do love reference books though. I kept a whole series of encyclopedias on animals for years, but must have discarded them a while back, because they’re gone. My parents have a wonderful collection of books and if they were threatening to get rid of them I’d probably go around there with a wheelbarrow!