The Book Nerd’s Guide to Recommending Books to Coworkers

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.
When you break it down, your relationships with your coworkers are going to be some of the weirdest interactions you have within this, the human race. Depending on where you work (and how invested you are in your current career trajectory), your coworkers could possibly comprise a group of people with whom you hold few common interests and, in some cases, would never voluntarily exist in the same room with.
And yet. You have to coexist. You are paid to sit, stand, or—for our tech-industry friends—roll around in an indoor ball pit next to these people for around 40 hours a week. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to pretend to like it. And that means a whole bunch of small talk and feigned interest in purchases of household appliances.
And sometimes that means you get to talking about your actual interests, like, most importantly, your beloved books. Even if you happen to like your coworkers, the process of recommending reading to them is fraught with potential traps: What if they hate it? Do I get to hate them if they hate it? Will they hate me? What if they dog-ear the pages?
Naturally, with great risk comes great reward; occasionally, you can hit a book rec out of the park. But the pitfalls are many. Here is the knowledge I have gleaned on how to make this transaction as painless as possible.
Identify your coworker’s “type”
At this point, I’m not even talking their preferred genre, because asking someone who’s not obsessive-compulsive about jacket covers what his favorite genre is doesn’t always yield much fruit. No, instead, I find it useful to straight up sort the person in question into a house like the mystical talking headpiece I am—only I make far more hasty generalizations.

• Hufflepuffs will read what you recommend within two weeks and never once let you know they hated it after page 2.
• Ravenclaws will read what you recommend, quietly study a host of reviews, listen to an NPR interview with the author, and cull a list of further reading to email to you with the subject line, “Great book! I just had a few thoughts…”
• Gryffindors will read what you recommend off and on, in break times between their extracurricular activities, finally finishing it after enough time has gone by that you’ve forgotten most of the plot.
• Slytherins will pretend not to read what you recommend and then give the same book recommendation to your boss two weeks later. In front of you.

Don’t recommend to Slytherins. It’s not worth your mental health. If you’re only recommending, not lending, to a Gryffindor, you’re fine (see below). With Ravenclaws, you’re scouting a potential book club member. And as for Hufflepuffs, try not to ruin their lives by putting a 500-page book in their hands that they won’t enjoy, which brings us to our next point…
Gather more data
It’s difficult when you read a book you love not to recommend it to every bewildered barista, captive train passenger, and utter stranger you pass on the street, but when it comes to your coworkers, shoving books at them can lead to heartbreak. If you adore All the Light We Cannot See, and they give up reading it after three chapters, you’re going to consider them a monster. And that’s going to put a damper on your professional relationship.
So before you start doling out the to-read lists, collect and consider the following information about your intended recipient who is totally not a Slytherin:

• If they can name preferred genres, what are they? (Side note: I think this should be included on job applications.)
• What’s the last book they truly enjoyed?
• What are their out-of-work time constraints?
• Does their attention span allow them to read text longer than compliance emails?
• Will it be awkward to discuss explicit fictional content with this person? If yes, quietly mark Outlander and all epic fantasy off the list.

Once you have gathered this information, it will be easier for you to winnow possible titles of interest—or, more importantly, possible titles this person could conceivably finish.
Lender beware, you’re in for a scare
Of course, all of this becomes more complicated if you are lending a coworker the book, too. Book-squatting is something all bibliophiles dread: I’m not entirely convinced Benjamin Franklin didn’t start this country’s first library to get people to stop poaching his own hard-earned books. But when you’re forced to stare across a cubicle at someone who’s been holding onto your copy of Neverwhere for six months, it can get ugly.
Avoid at all costs loaning out your personal copies, because the last thing you want is HR up in your literary dispute because you traced “Give it back” in the sand of your coworker’s desk zen garden. Unless, of course, you want to get real passive-aggressive-official and style yourself a librarian. In which case, have fun sitting alone at the company picnic, reading your favorite book.