TOUCH WOOD

What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.

- CASEY CEP

Once we've read about Doctor Lion, Doctor Dog, and Nurse Nelly four or five times, she's ready to go back to the beginning. She never tires of studying the various professional activities of the residents of Busytown: Farmer Alfalfa and Grocer Cat, Blacksmith Fox and Captain Salty, homemakers and construction workers, police officers and firefighters, bakers and engineers.

The literature of work begins in childhood but doesn't end there. Novelists have long attended to labor, from the mills of Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley" and the mines of Émile Zola's "Germinal" to the more recent portrayal of Target loading docks in Adelle Waldman's "Help Wanted." In the world of nonfiction, though, we regrettably associate work with how-to and self-help: the manuals that teach you to become anything from a mechanic to a movie director; the wikiHow pages that promise to make anyone, regardless of profession, capable of cleaning a P-trap, refinishing a floor, or replacing the coolant in an air-conditioner.