Amy Lindgren

If you’re a reader, then you already know that books come in all stripes and flavors. Whatever issue you’re working through, whatever curiosity has overtaken you, or whatever hour you’re trying to kill, there will be a book out there somewhere to help.

As someone who gobbles up books indiscriminately, I have a lot of random items in my collection. Although I do have an e-reader, somehow the print experience appeals to my tactile nature. Hence, the afore-mentioned collection.

Following are some titles I thought I’d share, each with some connection to a job search or vocational theme — but none of them guides for actually conducting a job search or improving your career. Those can come after the new year, when we all get serious again about being serious.

Fiction

We’ll start with the fiction, which is always fun. I won’t burden you with extensive descriptions, since that dims some of the joy of discovery. A few of these are old, so you may have to check online for a battered-up copy, but it will be worth it.

• The Burnout, by Sophie Kinsella. Penguin Random House, 2023. Contemporary romance / humor novel about two burned-out professionals who connect up at a ramshackle British resort.

• The Coworker, by Freida McFadden. Hollywood Upstairs Press, 2023. This psychological thriller is set in an office and told partly in emails. This one’s on my shelf, waiting to be read. Hope it’s good…

• The Quitter, by Harvey Pekar; illustrated by Dean Haspiel. Vertigo, 2006. A graphic novel telling the somewhat gritty story of the now-famous artist’s early years and difficult search for his vocation. If you haven’t dived into the late Pekar’s work in the past (and if you like getting an unvarnished life perspective as told in graphic novels), any of his books is sure to be a treat.

• Resume with Monsters, by William Browning Spencer. Borealis 1995. Horror, as happens to an employee of Ralph’s One-Day Resume shop. Bwa-ha-ha-ha. (Winner of an international horror award for Best Novel.)

• Undead and Unemployed, by MaryJanice Davidson. Berkley Sensation, 2004. Vampire Romance (yes, that’s a category!) A reluctant vampire deals with losing her job while handling undead issues. One of 15 in Davidson’s humorous Undead series, set in the Twin Cities.

• Up in the Air, by Betty Riegel. Simon & Schuster, 2013. This one’s an occupational memoir, so it’s not really fiction. But I wanted to keep it close to the next two on the list. In this book, Riegel shares her experiences as a Pan Am stewardess, traveling the world in the iconic airline’s prestigious heyday. It’s a fun nostalgia trip for folks who remember when flying didn’t include a pat-down.

Not to be confused with … Up in the Air, the 2009 movie starring George Clooney about a man whose job entails flying tens of thousands of miles annually to help terminate employees in mass layoffs. I know, that’s awful — but it’s much more entertaining than it sounds.

And the movie was based on, you guessed it, a novel: Up in the Air, by Walter Kern. Doubleday, 2001. Categorized as psychological fiction, this novel by then-literary editor of GQ Magazine came along just as the United States was stumbling through the extensive layoffs of the recession caused by the bursting dot-com bubble.

Nonfiction

• Building: A carpenter’s notes on life and the art of good work, by Mark Ellison. Random House, 2023. A carpenter’s meditations on work, creativity and design. Building received a lot of attention this year, with the author giving some really insightful radio interviews.

• Gig: Americans talk about their jobs at the turn of the millennium, co-edited by Minnesota native John Bowe. Three Rivers Press, 2000. An updated concept of Studs Terkel’s famous Working interviews (see below), but with the essays written by the subjects themselves.

• Hidden America: From coal miners to cowboys, an extraordinary exploration of the unseen people who make this country work, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. GP Putnam’s Sons, 2012. Laskas limits herself to only nine occupations, but the stories are well-researched and reported in a lively way, making a highly readable book.

Related Articles

Working Strategies: Suggestions for awkward gift-giving moments

Working Strategies: Change is possible at any age. Get started by asking these questions

Working Strategies: In defense of long resumes

Working Strategies: Thanksgiving leftovers — thoughts, that is.

• Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do, by Studs Terkel, 1974. NY: Pantheon/Random House. Frank and revealing work-bios across dozens of professions, as told to Terkel, an oral historian and broadcaster.

To find more

And if that’s not enough…here’s a librarian-selected grouping of hundreds of fiction and non-fiction titles starring characters with occupations ranging from acrobats to undertakers.

https://librarybooklists.org/fiction/adult/occupation.htm

Happy reading!

Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

Christmas Eve day happens to be the third day of spring for members of the Royal Order of the 21sters, those of us who are comfortably delusional with the insistence that once the days began getting longer at 9:27 p.m. Dec. 21, the misery of winter was behind us. We see light at the end of the tunnel. Some of us are jogging in shorts.

And aren’t the running paths and streets and sidewalks glorious? Of course they are. We could just as easily be fighting icy ruts and slippery going and the wet glop that moves young mothers to sigh as they constantly change snowsuits and place the mittens and boots to dry near the radiator, promoting the malodorous smell of wet dogs.

It was about this time of year in 1991, following the Halloween Blizzard, that I was driving on Grand Avenue one night when my wheels jumped out of the rutted paths and I was suddenly sailing horizontally down the street. I don’t miss that.

We went to a preschooler’s Christmas program the other night and everybody seemed cheerful. We didn’t have to stomp snow off our shoes in the gathering space or stuff our pockets with caps and gloves. The child in question had a little trouble with the sign of the cross, waving her hands around like she was waving away wasps. Then she got the bright idea that she could probably stand out even more if she slid the wide ribbon on her head down over her face and sang while masked.

Her sisters were in stitches.

“What am I going to do with her?’’ her mother said.

“Boarding school,’’ I said. “In Europe.’’

The show lasted only 30 minutes start to finish and we were back outside. We weren’t freezing and we weren’t falling down in the parking lot. Nature is endlessly whimsical and we will have to pay for this brown Christmas sooner or later, but for now we’re on Easy Street, cheating the Polar Express with each passing day.

I might turn the water back on, hook up a hose and wash a car. What couldn’t we do? Golfing is not out of the question. I now still have time to trim some branches off the lilac bushes that drooped under all that snow last April and never rebounded. I should have gotten to them by now. I need a proper cutting tool, but I don’t mind heading off to the hardware store on these snow-free streets.

In my neck of the woods, street construction appears to have concluded and the new pavement is wonderful. I thought a string of islands built on Fairview Avenue would be problematic under plowed snow, but now that they can still be seen, they are pleasant enough architectural affectations.

Orthopedic surgeons and snowmobile dealers have their noses pressed to the window. The rest of us are giddy to see how long this can last. I look at temperatures in Florida cities and I wouldn’t go through the hassle of an airport to gain a measly 30 degrees.

Oh, it’s just heavenly and I know it can’t last. Any day now, the snow will fall and we will encounter the bane of our winter experience, the dreaded pothole.

Enjoy it while it lasts and join the 21sters in spirit if you wish. If we can’t gut out another eight weeks or so, then we weren’t meant to be Minnesotans.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic’’ podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

Related Articles

Dreaming of a white Christmas? Try Alaska. Meteorologists say Minnesota will get a wet Christmas

Just one of about 40 St. Paul Neighborhood STAR grants went to an arts organization

St. Paul potholes: mission accomplished?

Man sentenced for putting bogus bomb outside St. Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Courthouse

Judge revokes sex offender’s probation after lewd conduct at Rosedale Center

A lack of snow may delay next month’s annual John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.

Erin Altemus’ dog sled team pauses on a recent snow-free training run near Grand Marais, Minn. The team is pulling an ATV instead of a sled. The warm and dry winter could disrupt the 2024 Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon. (Courtesy of Erin Altemus)

Mike Keyport, president of the Beargrease board of directors, said a decision will be made in the first week of January on whether to postpone the race’s Jan. 28 start date to March 3.

With the 300-mile route from Duluth to Grand Portage, Minn., nearly snowless, Keyport is hoping this winter’s warm weather will cool and enough snow will fall to reach the preferred 18-inch base of snow on the trails.

But the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center’s eight- to 14-day outlook and January through March outlook both predict above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation for the region.

“I would say I’m not in panic mode, but very concerned,” said Keyport, the great-grandson of John Beargrease, an Anishinaabe man who delivered mail along the North Shore via dog sled.

If there ends up being more snow further north, organizers are also considering moving the start line from Billy’s bar, just outside Duluth, to Two Harbors.

If the race is postponed to March 3-5, it will overlap with the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, meaning at least four teams signed up for both races will forgo the Beargrease for the Iditarod, Keyport said.

That includes Grand Marais musher Erin Altemus, who was planning to run Beargrease in the lead-up to her Iditarod debut.

Now, she’s looking for alternatives where there’s snow, like a race in Idaho scheduled at the same time as Beargrease. She’s also considering taking her team to Alaska earlier than expected to prepare there.

With no snow, Altemus has been behind her team on an ATV instead of a sled. While that’s common for fall training, this is the latest she’s had to run an ATV, forcing her to shorten training distances and repeat the same section of trail.

She came across about a half-inch of snow during her training run Thursday, but she doesn’t expect it to survive this weekend’s warmup.

“I’ve been feeling for weeks now that Beargrease isn’t going to happen,” Altemus said. “I don’t know. We’ve just been stuck in this weather pattern where every time it looks like it’s going to snow, it’ll pop up on the forecast and then within a day or hours of the supposed snowfall, it’ll disappear from the forecast.”

Linda Engebretson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Duluth, said the unseasonably warm and dry conditions are likely to continue for the next couple of weeks. She pointed to the Climate Prediction Center’s prediction that the El Nino has a 54% chance of being “historically strong” through January. El Nino is the warming of the Pacific Ocean surface temperatures near the equator, which affects jet streams and weather across North America.

“We still have the El Nino out there that is essentially a very strong El Nino, and we’re likely to have that continue through the winter,” Engebretson said.

The climate is also warming, which has had mixed effects on regional snow. While a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to more snow, there are fewer days with at least 6 inches of snow on the ground, the News Tribune previously reported. Mixed precipitation events are more likely, too.

Beargrease was canceled in 2007 and 2012 due to a lack of snow, but Keyport is holding out hope.

Beargrease musher Keith Aili celebrates with his dogs at the finish line of the 2023 John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon at the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino on Jan. 31, 2023. (Clint Austin / Forum News Service)

“You never know — it might start snowing and not stop,” he said.

Keyport said a postponed race would prompt race organizers, mushers, veterinarians and volunteers to work through logistical challenges, and if too many mushers back out, then that might cause a cancellation. And if there is more snow by March, the temperature will also need to cooperate.

“We can get some fairly warm days in March when snow gets a little slushy, and again, we’re talking about dog safety,” Keyport said.

Altemus said her husband, Matthew Schmidt, was planning to run a team in Beargrease, too, marking the first time the couple, who operate Sawtooth Racing near Grand Marais, would be competing in the same race.

“We are holding hope that Beargrease is going to happen, and we’re still preparing for it like it is,” Altemus said. “But I know they are going to make a decision in like two weeks here. So, it’s coming soon.”

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli airstrike killed 76 members of an extended family, rescue officials said Saturday, a day after the U.N. chief warned again that nowhere is safe in Gaza and that Israel’s ongoing offensive is creating “massive obstacles” to the distribution of humanitarian aid.

Friday’s strike on a building in Gaza City was among the deadliest of the Israel-Hamas war, now in its 12th week, said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense department. He provided a partial list of the names of those killed — 16 heads of households from the al-Mughrabi family — and said the dead included women and children.

Among the dead were Issam al-Mughrabi, a veteran employee of U.N. Development Program, his wife, and their five children.

“The loss of Issam and his family has deeply affected us all. The U.N. and civilians in Gaza are not a target,” said Achim Steiner, the head of the agency. “This war must end.”

Israel declared war after Hamas militants stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking some 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to keep up the fight until Hamas is destroyed and removed from power in Gaza and all the hostages are freed.

More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war to destroy Hamas and more than 53,000 have been wounded, according to health officials in Gaza, a besieged territory ruled by the Islamic militant group for the past 16 years.

Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, citing the group’s use of crowded residential areas for military purposes and its tunnels under urban areas. It has unleashed thousands of airstrikes since Oct. 7, and has largely refrained from commenting on specific attacks, including discussing the intended target.

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution that calls for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.

The United States won the removal of a tougher call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas. It abstained in the vote, as did Russia, which wanted the stronger language. The resolution was the first on the war to make it through the council after the U.S. vetoed two earlier ones calling for humanitarian pauses and a full cease-fire.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated his longstanding call for a humanitarian cease-fire. He expressed hope that Friday’s resolution may help this happen but said “much more is needed immediately” to end the ongoing “nightmare” for the people in Gaza.

He told a news conference that it’s a mistake to measure the effectiveness of the humanitarian operation in Gaza by the number of trucks.

“The real problem is that the way Israel is conducting this offensive is creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza,” he said. He said the prerequisites for an effective aid operation don’t exist — security, staff that can work in safety, logistical capacity especially trucks, and the resumption of commercial activity.

Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report this week from the United Nations and other agencies.

Shielded by the Biden administration, Israel has so far resisted international pressure to scale back. The military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that forces are widening the ground offensive “to additional areas of the strip, with a focus on the south.”

He said operations were also continuing in the northern half of Gaza, including Gaza City, the initial focus of Israel’s ground offensive. The army said that it carried out airstrikes against Hamas fighters in several locations of Gaza City.

The army also said Saturday that it has transferred more than 700 alleged militants from Gaza to Israel for further questioning, including more than 200 over the past week, providing rare details on a controversial policy that involves mass roundups of Palestinian men.

Palestinians have reported such roundups in areas of northern Gaza, where ground troops are in control, saying this typically involves all teenage boys and men found in a location being searched by troops. Some of the released detainees have said they were stripped to their underwear, beaten and held for days with minimal water. The military has denied abuse allegations and said those without links to militants were quickly released.

Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, including about 2,000 in the past three weeks, but has not presented any evidence to back up the claim. It says 139 of its soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive.

In the aftermath of the U.N. resolution, it was not immediately clear how and when aid deliveries would accelerate. Currently, trucks enter through two crossings — Rafah on the border with Egypt and Kerem Shalom on the border with Israel.

As part of the approved resolution, the U.S. negotiated the removal of language that would have given the U.N. authority to inspect aid going into Gaza, something Israel says it must continue to do to ensure material does not reach Hamas.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, thanked the U.S. for its support and sharply criticized the U.N. for its failure to condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. The U.S. vetoed a resolution in October that would have included a condemnation because it didn’t also underline Israel’s right to self-defense.

Hamas said in a statement that the U.N. resolution should have demanded an immediate halt to Israel’s offensive, and it blamed the United States for pushing “to empty the resolution of its essence” before Friday’s Security Council vote.