This evening, I'm grateful for the varieties of work that keep human life going in all it's dimensions. With Walt Whitman, we can still "Hear America Singing" our various songs while we work. Some of the songs may have become edgy and cynical, but guys like Mike Rowe do much to remind us of the goodness of hands-on work and how it is more important than ever.
Despite the absurd satire around The Office concerning so-called knowledge work, there's still a lot to be gained from working on all kinds of work.
This morning, I scanned my bookshelves for books that have something significant, directly or indirectly, to say about work, and different kinds of work. I was surprised to find how books I have, old and new, related to work in some way, and I thought I'd play with a few AI tools to help take inventory of some of the books and ideas I've worked through over the years. I'm fascinated by ways that AI tools may or may not be helpful for work. At times, we lean too much on the emerging tools, and the hype does get exhausting, but sometimes AI tools are actually helpful. Just don't expect too much of them or assume too much about their accuracy!
In this case, I used a free AI voice transcriber to capture the authors and titles of the books I had slightly pulled out of my shelf. Later, I ran that list through ChatGPT to edit, clean it up, and group it into categories. The results aren't terrible, as a friend of mine would say. I did a lot of shuffling and adjusting categories, and it still seems incomplete. Each of these books could get a post from me about gratitude for their insights and opinions.
Work, Vocation, and the Meaning of Labor
Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by BahnsenRedeeming Capitalism by Barnes
What Are People For? by Berry
The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Crawford
Every Good Endeavor by Keller
Essentialism by McKeown
The Sacredness of Secular Work by Raynor
Small is Beautiful by Schumacher
"On Principle" by Thoreau
The Work of Teaching, Learning, and Human Formation
The Well-Educated Mind by Bauer
What the Best College Teachers Do by Bain
Engaging Ideas by Bean
The English Coach’s Instructional Playbook by Berry and Degen
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey
Designing Your New Work Life by Burnett and Evans
Why Read? by Edmundson
The Vocation of a Teacher by Morris
Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys by Smith and Wilhelm
These Six Things by Stuart
Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian by The Great Books Foundation
Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform by Tyack and Cuban
Education for Human Flourishing by Spears and Loomis
Effective Grading by Walvoord and Anderson
The Work of Rhetoric, Writing, and the Craft of Communication
The Rhetoric of Rhetoric by Booth
The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb, and Williams
Writing and the Sense of Self by Brooke
Teaching Arguments by Fletcher
Writing Rhetorically by Fletcher
Can Poetry Matter? by Gioia
Rewriting by Harris
Bird by Bird by Lamott
Revising Prose by Lanham
A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers by Lindemann
How to Think Like Shakespeare by Newstok
The Language of Life by Moyers
The Writer’s Workshop by Roper
The Work of Thinking, Philosophy, and Human Understanding
How to Know a Person by Brooks
The Good Life Method by Sullivan and Blaschko
How to Think by Jacobs
Learning to Disagree by Inazu
Socratic Logic by Kreeft
Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas by Pegis
Working with Technology, the Future, and Society
2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity by Lennox
Being Digital by Negroponte
1984 by Orwell
Future Shock by Toffler
Ancient, Classic, and Literary Reflections on Work and Life
Genesis by Moses
Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth
The Divine Comedy by Dante
"A&P" by Updike
Death of a Salesman by Miller
The Milagro Beanfield War by Nichols
The Winter of Our Discontent by Steinbeck
Working on Relationships, Conflict, and Cooperation
How to Have Impossible Conversations by Boghossian and Lindsay
The Peacemaker by Sande
Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton, and Heen
Reclaiming Conversation by Turkle
Working on Productivity, Creativity, Society, and Culture
Making It All Work by AllenCapital by Marx
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
The Master and His Emissary by McGilchrist
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Rose