![]() ![]() For a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. 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. Being wildly overprepared answered the question that people had but didn't ask when they first met me. ![]() 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. I must have been a Spartan in my previous life, because nothing pleases me more than work." ![]() Never mind, I tell myself, I'm having fun too. ![]() 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. Each does its job well, in very different ways. 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. ![]()
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