What Are They Reading at Stanford Business School?

What do they read about in their spare time at Stanford Graduate School of Business? The usual: God, baseball, and the collapse of society. At the end of each fall quarter faculty, students, and staff at the school nominate books they’d like to read for the Books on Break program. The tomes are added to bedside and airplane reading stacks and in January the sponsors host a series of informal book groups to talk about the works — this year 18 in all. What’s on the 2006 list?

• After the Quake: Stories, by Haruki Murakami
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
• Conspiracy of Paper, by David Liss
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson et al
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls Guns
• Germs & Steel: The Fall of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, by Karen Armstrong
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
• The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
• Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, by Jerry Avorn
• She Wins, You Win, by Gail Evans
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck
• We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, by Miles Horton and Paolo Freire
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, by Thomas Friedman