81 Books Like Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Careers

Beyond Retention is a non-fiction title that has the same narrative as my novel Resilience. Through various stories of lived experience, this title brings to light all the issues of race and gender inequality in higher institutions. What makes this book special is that it doesn't focus only on faculty but deals with administrators as well. Every woman who is interested in a career in academia should have and read Beyond Retention, as it offers ways through which one can thrive and not just survive in higher education.

Cracking the Wall 20 Years Later is a special title for me, not only because of the significance of its content. I used the original edition in 1993 as a student at the University of San Francisco and then later as a professor at the College of Notre Dame. This book showcases the history of 14 women in academia and highlights the importance of the array of significant changes that need to be made today. What I love most about this book is that the same authors have updated their original chapters and their personal perspective of their experiences and career paths as leaders.  They speak from the heart as they share their transformational stories. They do not sugarcoat anything.  Even though there have been considerable changes in two decades, a great deal has remained the same for women. This is another essential title of empowerment, which lets women know… show more.

Sarah by Laura Albert aka JT LeRoy captivated my attention right from the start. The story crackles with originality even years after its release. The writing is so vivid that it engulfs the reader in the story. The characters are three dimensional, and the tale being told in the first person and present tense makes you empathize more with the main character. Having gone through a difficult upbringing, the story of Cherry Vanilla and their quest to find love and acceptance spoke to me. This is a title I would highly recommend, not only for the merit of the writing but also because its message continues to resonate to this day. Also check out the audiobook of Sarah, read splendidly by Winsome Brown.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello is a title to be treasured. Through a series of masterfully woven stories, Johnson brings forth and highlights the deep-rooted racial inequalities in our country. Having my debut novel published later in life, I feel a special connection because Johnson’s recent release is about resilience and passion for the arts – and it proves that ageism has no place in the art world. This is another fiction title I would highly recommend. There’s a lesson to be learned from every character and every story penned in My Monticello.  

A life in the wild entails sacrifice in addition to romance.

Few readers would think of Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner as a book about the mountains. Its narrator is an elderly man confined to a wheelchair who spends his days researching a biography. Yet his fascinating subject is his frontier-era grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, who gave up a life among sophisticates on the East Coast to follow her husband, a geological engineer, into the mountains of the West. There she found beauty and adventure, but also isolation from the culture and society she had left behind. Are the mountains enough to sustain us without such things?

I read this book in the year after my father died; it was one of his favorites and tied together many of his own interests: genealogy, research, books, family, and the outdoors. Angle of Repose is a long novel and the characters… show more.

Malcolm Harris is a brilliant thinker in the tradition of the radical writer, whose books are always deeply researched, fearlessly polemical, and highly relevant. His previous books talked about millennials, Occupy Wall Street, and growing inequality.

This new book is a magisterial and incredibly ambitious work of nonfiction that focuses on Palo Alto and then zooms out from there to explain the formation of the contemporary economy, including but not limited to the modern-day tech industry. Full of fascinating stories and shocking insights.

Until the 1980s, it seemed like Route 128 in Massachusetts was set to be the dominant location for the tech industry. What could have been a dry look at comparative corporate organizational structures is instead a compelling analysis of the contrasting cultures, business climates, and other forces resulting in the ultimate victory of Silicon Valley. The book is full of fascinating details that I haven’t read anywhere else like the role that California community colleges played in ensuring companies could swiftly train new employees.

A singular account by the project leader of an ambitious effort to create a pathbreaking software program, Startup is Kaplan’s splendid chronicle of his company’s visionary pursuit of merging the pen with the computer. With a doctorate in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and a slew of connections in Silicon Valley, Kaplan seemed well-placed for success. But while saddening to him and his team, the failure of Go, his software company, made for a valuable story about the perils and possibilities of dreaming big in computer code.

The book is filled with valuable anecdotes and lessons from code-writers and includes a memorable line that embodies the highs and lows of Kaplan’s experience. Flush with confidence, he had named his company Go, and on the day the assets of his code-child were sold at auction, he wrote: “I had to accept that impossible, final truth: Go was gone. Six… show more.

I deeply appreciate the way that Lécuyer undermines the myth that a few genius entrepreneurs and venture capitalists invented Silicon Valley from nothing.

He documents the pre-history of Silicon Valley, showing how the “ham radio” operators of the early 20th Century found support from the U.S. Navy to build a micro-electronics industry in the San Francisco Bay Area before World War II. A skilled technical workforce was available when, partly by chance and partly through the initiative of Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman (himself a radio engineer), the semiconductor industry found its home.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and one of the wealthiest men in the world. This didn’t make him an attentive, loving father. Lisa was regularly ignored, and deliberately left out of his new family (he never married her mother). Her determination to win his love failed, and she blamed herself for his lack of acceptance. She longed for reassurance that never materialized. Lisa had to face the unwanted reality: “He doesn’t love me.” When Jobs was dying from pancreatic cancer, with tears, he owned that none of this was her fault. In spite of the sadness of her story, she didn’t allow his rejection and late confession to consume her with bitterness. She writes honestly and kindly about growing up with a famous father. For those of us who have searched and never gained our father’s love or acceptance, this story reminds us that… show more.