May Reading List
These Books Might Change Your Career
Double Bind: Women on Ambition edited by Robin Romm
Next Move, Best Move by Kimberly Brown
Chemistry by Weike Wang
It’s About Damn Time by Arlan Hamilton
The Memo by Minda Harts
Machiavelli for Women by Stacey Vanek Smith
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
This month’s reading list is career-focused. The books I’ve chosen for this list offer both direct career advice and/or strategy, such as Machiavelli for Women, or Kimberly Brown’s Next Move, Best Move, and also broader perspectives on the professional life, such as Double Bind, a collection of essays on women and ambition, and Lab Girl, a memoir about life as a professor.
For strategy and direct advice, Minda Harts gives us The Memo, on what minoritized people, especially women of color need to know in order to successfully navigate the corporate space. Similarly, in Next Move, Best Move, Kimberly Brown helps you transition well and level up in your career with concrete strategies based on her extensive professional experience. In Machiavelli for Women, journalist Stacey Vanek Smith digs into the research on how women can be strategic in their careers, using Machiavelli as a starting point, and inspiration. (Don’t worry though, this book isn’t at all cold-blooded.)
Somewhere in between direct advice and giving broader perspective lies Arlan Hamilton’s It’s About Damn Time, which tells her incredible story of becoming a venture capitalist, and using being underestimated in the corporate space to her advantage, an excellent lesson for those of us who are often underestimated for various reasons. Hope Jahren also shares her life with us in Lab Girl, which talks about her life, and lab as a professor studying trees. The incredible writing and vulnerability will make you think a lot about what it means to pursue a goal, especially a difficult one, and the hardships and challenges along the way.
Perhaps on the other end of this spectrum is our fiction pick, Weike Wang’s debut novel Chemistry, which asks us to consider if the hardships are really worth it, and what it might mean to walk away from everything, not just the career, but all the expectations that others might have of you, to give yourself the space to figure you out. This novel wrestled with professional ambition versus personal desire, and asked us to consider if there could ever be a winner in that battle.
In the final book on this list, the collection of essays by women on ambition, Double Bind also wrestles, as women come to terms with claiming the label of an ambitious woman, and everything that may or may not come with that. They take us through a variety of perspectives here, from open embrace of ambition since early childhood, to a reluctance to use such a label, even as they write about it. This essay collection offers us something important when we consider the professional life is more than just going to work every day, it is also how we navigate the world itself, and how our careers interact with our relationships with our loved ones.
