I read for a living, more or less, so Labor Day's approach seems like a good excuse to share some recent titles I loved that are, in addition to many other things, about work. Each does its job well, in very different ways.
In Tahmima Anam's novel The Startup Wife (Scribner, $26), Asha, the designer of an algorithm to unlock the empathetic brain for AI, gets enmeshed in a tech startup with her husband, eventually "wondering how I've managed to set up a situation where I'm doing all the work and he's having all the fun. Never mind, I tell myself, I'm having fun too. I must have been a Spartan in my previous life, because nothing pleases me more than work."
Where You Are Is Not Who You Are: A Memoir(Amistad, $27.99) is an incisive and inspiring book by former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, who writes: "I worked extremely hard, and that was a big positive in my career.... Being wildly overprepared answered the question that people had but didn't ask when they first met me. How the hell did she get here?"
Violette Toussaint, the French cemetery caretaker--by every definition--in Valérie Perrin's novel Fresh Water for Flowers, translated by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions, $16.95), observes: "My job consists of being discreet, liking human contact, not feeling compassion. For a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. Not part of my planet, or my skill set. But I never cry in front of a visitor."
The narrator of Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, translated by Polly Barton (Bloomsbury, $18), is a young woman who wants a job near her house and, "ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair." Complications ensue, beginning when she's hired to spy on a writer: "I'd come to the conclusion that there were very few jobs in the world that ate up as much time and as little brainpower as watching over the life of a novelist who lived alone and worked from home." --Robert Gray, editor
