One of the great treats of the summer is when I open my e-mail to find the list of best-selling books from the SHRM store at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference.

It’s not because I love book lists or what they’re selling at the SHRM store. No, I love the annual SHRM store conference book list because it gives me an opportunity to see yet again how the people at SHRM who put out this list can continue to water down what was once a useful comparative tool and muck it up by not ranking the annual best-sellers and by also throwing in stuff like top-selling software and videos. (Videos? Did they miss the move to DVD?)

My guess is that they do it because they don’t like lists that allow readers to compare and contrast what people are reading from one year to the next, and perhaps make a few assumptions and draw some conclusions.

That’s probably why SHRM has watered down the summer list of best-sellers from the annual conference, although this year they’ve removed the caveat from last summer (these are “just some of the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference”) and now simply say that they are listing “the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories from this year’s Annual Conference SHRMStore in New Orleans, LA.”

So, I present here again this year, without further comment, the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the recent conference. And, as I always say, you can tell a lot by the books a person buys. If you agree, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s SHRM New Orleans tell you about the HR profession during the summer of the Great Recession?

• Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail, by Keith Ferrazzi
• 101 Tough Conversations to Have With Employees: A Manager’s Guide to Addressing Performance, Conduct and Discipline Challenges, by Paul Falcone
• Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro
• Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice, and Competitive Advantage, by William H. Macey, Benjamin Schneider, Karen M. Barbera and Scott A. Young
• Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
• 101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems, by Paul Falcone
• Management Courage: Having the Heart of a Lion, by Margaret Morford
• The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness, by Dave Ramsey
• The Essential Guide to Workplace Investigations: How to Handle Employee Complaints & Problems, by Lisa Guerin
• New Employee Orientation Training, by Karen Lawson
• Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors, by Dianna Booher
• How to Deal With Annoying People: What to Do When You Can’t Avoid Them, by Bob Phillips and Kimberly Alyn
• Please Sue Me: The Guide to Safe Hiring and Firing Practices for the Frontline Manager With a Short Attention Span, by Hunter Lott
• State-by-State Guide to Human Resources Law 2009, by John F. Buckley
• Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Succession Planning, by Linkage Inc.
• Auditing Your Human Resources Department, by John H. McConnell
• Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), by David Marcum and Steven Smith
• The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance, by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Dave Ulrich
• Leave the Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time … and Feel Great About It, by Laura Stack
• Loyalty Unplugged: How to Get, Keep & Grow All Four Generations, by Adwoa K. Buahene and Giselle Kovary
• 2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results, by Paul Falcone
• The Personal Credibility Factor: How to Get It, Keep It, and Get It Back (If You’ve Lost It), by Sandy Allgeier
• What If? Short Stories to Spark Diversity Dialogue, by Steve L. Robbins

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There is a trend in business publishing of couching business lessons in parables and stories, and while it may have started with the saga of Sniff and Scurry in Who Moved My Cheese?, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.

I understand why authors use fables featuring mice, horses and even Santa Claus. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.

Call me a grump, but I’ll take my business books straight up, without the cutesy literary devices. If the book has real-life drama that imparts a business message, I’ll gladly read that. You may disagree with some of its conclusions, but Moneyball was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from Conspiracy of Fools.

Occasionally, novels have something to say to readers about business culture, and workforce issues specifically. Two recent examples are Company by Max Barry, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.

The company in Company seems to sell training packages. But like the main character in the book, a newly minted MBA who is about to take a trip down the corporate rabbit hole, you’d never know that from its mission statement:

“Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”

What is really going on at Zephyr is something much more comically diabolical than that corporate doublespeak would let on. If you ever thought your employer was messing with your head as some kind of experiment, you’ll appreciate what’s afoot at Zephyr. The company’s human resources operation occupies the third floor, and since Zephyr has some odd notions about corporate culture, this means HR’s floor is actually third from the top of the building. The first floor belongs to the CEO, who seems to exist only in voice mail. Likewise, HR seems inhuman. There’s just a desk, and a calm, terrifying, disembodied voice that, when it speaks, seems to know every employee’s secrets.

Things are funny in a more realistic way at the failing Chicago advertising agency that is the setting for Then We Came to the End. Everyone is about a day away from being laid off—or, as the office lingo goes, “walking Spanish,” after a Tom Waits song and a pirate term. The anxiety levels are high. The book is told in first person plural, which seems like a gimmick at first, but you’ll find it grows on you—it’s easier than getting used to talking mice or Santa as CEO.

Few books capture a workplace’s intense, hilarious, pathetic and occasionally terrifying atmosphere as well as this one. There’s an honesty to it that cuts through all the malarkey you tend to find in the business books that offer easy answers about complex workplace issues. Take this section, on the complicated nature of a diverse workforce and the bad feelings roiling around a senior art director, Karen Woo:

“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys, especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean, but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her, and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean, but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”

You won’t learn everything you need to know about managing a workforce from either book, but you’ll get some insights that you won’t find among the monkeys and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.