What book for my desk at work? - Page 6

Nowadays, you'd have to have an extraordinary job to find any coworkers you'd want as friends. Putting books on your desk is a way to generate positive relations with the social climbers, fakers, and wannabes who you have to do business with. The smart people will get it at first glance.


Darn good reading there.

I'd recommend:

"The Great Depression of 1995" by Ravi Batra
"A Matter of Interpretation" by Antonin Scalia
"How Life Imitates Chess" by Garry Kasparov
"Nickle and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich

Unless you actually spend time at your desk reading novels instead of doing work like you're supposed to, there's no reason to have any texts other than work-related material on your desk.

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Everyone knows what it is, nobody has read it. I read it to prove a point, and trust me, it's the most unpleasant read I've ever encountered. If that isn't available, textbooks. Fishes: An Introduction to Ichthyology is what I have on my desk, but that's because I'm an ichthyologist, although it gets me plenty of compliments.

My dad brought home a book from his office one time. It was a book from the 1950's on appropriate office etiquette. It had a hilarious chapter on how to treat women. I can't remember what it said, but the unapologetic sexism was

I have edward tufte's graphing/charting book on my shelf. This is sort of an inspirational reference but it was bought by me and placed there to read and to use when trying to display some data in a usable and attractive way

I also have a textbook from an Economic Analysis of Law class I took...everything else was either pulled from our library/given to me/expensed to a client (SAS reference, a corp fin textbook, a couple of books on mapping, etc)