I'm posting this one because I get a lot of good suggestions from this thread and I want to give something back.
Dryer's English by Benjamin Dreyer
Subtitled "An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style", it is not a style book or an authoritative guide. Dreyer's book (the apostrophe in Dreyer's is a period and the dotted "I" in English is an apostrophe) is, however, chock full of what the copy chief of Random House publishing (that's Dreyer) looks for in a manuscript - not to approve it but to fix it. Nearly every page has a laugh, every page has many valuable insights, and everything is both light and educational. I learned, for example, that (sic) is not an abbreveation of "spelling incorrect" (even though it fits) - it is Latin for "thus." It means that even though what the author quoted contains bad grammar or a misspelling, what is quoted is what was in the original. Of course, there are his own preferences, like "Only godless savages eschew the series (Oxford) comma" and "Allow an author to display his or her voice, assuming the author really is an author and actually has a voice." He also insists (correctly) that "unique" requires no modifiers as to its "uniqueness" (something can be "almost unique" but NOT "very unique" OR "the most unique.") I got this volume from the library, as I do most of my reading material, but I'm going buy a copy for myself because it's just that useful.
