It’s that time of the year. Time to diligently sharpen your favorite tooth-marked number two pencil and pick out your nicest hand-me-downs. It’s back to school time! Or it was… until most of us graduated and got jobs. Now we spend our Septembers dreading the inevitable day when we get out of work and the sun is already down.
No matter. The autodidacts at Plan B [the agency alternative] have found a fantastic way to relive our braces-wearing, bag lunch-eating, bathroom stall-weeping school days: The Plan B Book Club! It’s an agency-wide initiative to feed our grey matter, eat lunch together, and fight viciously over ideologies we never knew we held. But mostly it’s just good, old-fashioned, book-learning fun.
So strap on your specs, Foureyes, and get ready to check off the Top 11 Books on Plan B’s Back-to-School Reading List*.
*Full disclosure: we are not insinuating that we have read any or all of these books, nor that we can read, period.
- The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen: Discover where genius and chance meet, and uncover the ifs, whens, and hows of innovations throughout time.
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell: Malcolm Gladwell does it again. Taking dense, egg-y research, whipping it briskly, and folding in fascinating anecdotes that result in a sweet, pleasant, meringue-like read.
- The Hunger Games by Susan Collins: The “Gap Kids” of dystopic teen murder fiction, we picked this over the bloody Japanese cult classic Battle Royale because it had more kissing.
- Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction by Matthew Kelly: A novel look at the benefits of integrating work with your life, and life with your work—achieving a “work-life effectiveness.”
- Hop on Pop by Dr. Suess: A dark, disturbing, and rhythmic look into modern family dynamics.
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg: Malcom Gladwell does it again, again! Oh wait… What? This is another author? Oooh, Gladwell’s gonna be pissed.
- Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo: Short and to the point, DeLillo chronicles the end times of a mega-billionaire, the economy as we know it, and one man’s quest for a quality haircut.
- Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday: I hate to break it to you, but apparently viral videos are strategically and thoughtfully produced, not sensational, hilarious strokes of luck. I’ll never trust a cute cat again.
- Twoot, Twit, Tweet by Larry Egret: An in depth look at the past, present and future of Twitter.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot: An epic stream of consciousness poem involving stubborn mermaids that resembles the mad ramblings of an over-caffeinated copywriter (ahem).
- The Plan B Employee Handbook by H.R: Haven’t gotten to it yet. Looks boring.
