Reading Got Matt a Job
Here’s a little story about how a book played a part in my husband’s career trajectory. Yes, my husband MATT who doesn’t read books. (Except for RAWTS and btw, we have a new selection but it’s gonna have to wait until 2026: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.)
Pictured here is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin. It won the Pulitzer in 1992. During Matt’s first year in the engineering school at Tufts, he had to take a half-credit “get to know engineering” class and was assigned this book to read. He also had a roommate whose sister was already out of college and lived in an apartment. (A real-life Mature Adult!) One weekend, Matt and his roommate went to do laundry at Mature Adult Sister’s apartment, and Matt brought The Prize to read. Sister’s roommate (so: roommate-once-removed? second-roommate?) asked if Matt had grabbed The Prize off of her bookshelf. Which, let’s face it, would be sort of a suave move. But he had not; it was his own copy. Long story short, this woman’s job was to market this book and Matt got an internship at Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Yergin’s firm) — initially helping her. He actually ended up interning there all throughout college (he was a chemical engineer), but his first assignment was signing copies of The Prize on behalf of Dan Yergin.
We do have a copy somewhere, but this book pictured is not ours.
See, my father-in-law has had a fruitful second career selling real estate on Cape Cod, and because a lot of homes there are vacation homes, when they go on the market there are often TONS of books to unload. (Paging James Patterson!) Well, guess what book was in one of his recent listings?! AND…it’s signed…
We don’t really have any way of knowing if this is a Matt Sheldon forgery or someone else’s impression or Yergin’s actual Hancock. But if it’s Matt’s? Kinda fun to think about those books still circulating.
Moral of the story: Reading is not frivolous because it might just land you a job. (And also, I weirdly miss not having laundry facilities at my fingertips. I got so much reading done in laundromats!)
originally published on instagram