We love the marriage of Martha Stewart style to a Socialist upbringing that Saïd writes about in his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. If you’ve read it, you know that these two ideologies aren’t mutually exclusive. Well, at least not in the continuum of a lifetime. Saïd and his wife, Karen, met while working for Martha Stewart’s empire at about the same time that Saïd was letting go of his socialist ideals. In place of the Party, he aligned himself with Martha’s principle of aesthetically pleasing randomness and gave himself permission to decorate.

Besides books about Communism, Saïd’s shelves boast a number of old-fashioned dictionaries–specialized dictionaries, everything you wanted to know about the U.S. military, or saints. He doesn’t keep them out of a sense of nostalgia. He needs them for reference because he disabled the Web from his computer. “So I can’t waste any time,” he said.

Stacked Up is noticing a trend among writers who disable the Web when they work. Both A. J. Jacobs and Ken Wheaton said that they keep a lid on the internet when they write. Saïd’s drastic measure means that he hits the public library to check his email. All this, he explained, so that he can avoid the tyranny of email that John Freeman describes. The topic of email leads Saïd to a story about a man at the library who regularly surfs porn under the watchful eye of the librarian. We learn that the porn-surfer is a large man, probably too large for the librarian to take down. As the story unfolds, we wonder if maybe the best thing about writers disabling the Web is that it brings them out into the world. Where they interact with potential characters in stories.

Lost and Found: Stories from New York edited by Thomas Beller
It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs edited by Smith Magazine
Love Is a Four-Letter Word edited by Michael Taeckens
Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories about Flying edited by Dorothy Spears
Granta 91: Wish You Were Here: The Magazine of New Writing edited by Ian Jack
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Before & After: Stories from New York edited by Thomas Beller

When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on
Repression in Iran by Reza Barahani

The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir by Laurie Sandell

Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung by Mao Tse-Tung

Essential Works of Marxism edited by Arthur Mendel

Webster’s New World Vest Pocket Dictionary

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

Lazy Little Loafers by Susan Orlean

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

Great Plains by Ian Frazier

Avian Medicine by by Branson Ritchie, Greg J. Harrison, Don Zantrop and Linda Harrison

Extra Extraordinary Chickens Stephen Green-Armytage

Keeping Pet Chickens by Johannes Paul

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider

Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell

Sweet and Low by Rich Cohen

Negotiate This!: By Caring, But Not T-H-A-T Much by Herb Cohen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas

Israel Is Real by Rich Cohen

The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival by Ken Wheaton

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The Judas Strain by James Rollins

On Writing by Stephen King

Powdered Eggs by Charles Simmons

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The Bible According to Mark Twain edited by Howard G. Baetzhold and Joseph B. McCullough

Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader by Harry Crews

The Long Haul by Amanda Stern

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Driving the Heart and Other Stories by Jason Brown

Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

Neuroses in Clinical Practice by Henry P. Laughlin

Influence by Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott

How Zebras Got Their Stripes by Leslie Sims and Laure Fournier

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Britannica Student Encyclopedia (16 vol.) by multiple authors

The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs

The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs

Reading the Bible Again For the First Time by Marcus J. Borg

Holy Bible by multiple authors

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman

More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss

Forever by Judy Blume

Like Life by Lorrie Moore

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss