A voyage around my bedroom

At the start of the summer I moved my desk (dining table) into my bedroom. A friend remembered that an ex used to warn never to do this as it affects your sleep but my bedroom is at the front of the flat, which gets sunshine most of the day - when it's sunny - and gives me a sense of the bustle on the street when working.

This set-up does mean your bed is soon covered with reference books, scraps of paper and magazines - it's like being a student again. But at least it's not like Proust; in his book How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997; pictured), Alain de Botton quotes a friend of the writer, Marie Nordlinger: 'The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible; the bed was littered with books and papers, his pillows were all over the place, a bamboo table on his left was piled high, and more often than not, there was no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor.' Thank goodness for my laptop.

Five years later, de Botton touched once more upon writing in bedrooms, in his book The Art of Travel. He recounts the tale of 27-year-old author Xavier de Maistre who, in 1790, undertook a Journey Around My Bedroom. Eight years later the Frenchman ventured a little further, to the windowsill, at night, in Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom. It is a genre de Botton dubs 'room-travel'. De Maistre, de Botton writes, 'particularly recommended room-travel to the poor and to those afraid of storms, robberies and high cliffs.'

I've been fortunate to venture a little further this summer but then I did have to pack more than de Maistre, who needed only 'a pair of pink and blue cotton pyjamas'. I do, however, possess such a pair of stripey pyjama bottoms, so perhaps I'm not as ill-equipped for this lifestyle as I feared.

Office life brought to book

The titles of Alain de Botton's most recent books of philosophical inquiry do their author an injustice. I was a big fan of his early novels, and enjoyed his musings on The Art of Travel, but was hacked off with The Consolations of Philosophy and couldn't be bothered with Status Anxiety or The Architecture of Happiness. I was intrigued by The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which has just come out in paperback, and am glad I gave into the impulse.

I suspected it may feature coping strategies for the modern workplace: bullied by your boss? Try this philosopher. Instead, it's a sweet investigation of how most of us spend most of our days. The section on tuna fishing made me think about the precise pressures of a 24-hour global economy in a way I'd never done before - further brought home by the effect of the volcanic ash crisis on Kenyan farmers, for instance. And I enjoyed his theory that sexual harrassment protocols exist in the workplace to prevent us spending all our time thinking about - or having - sex with colleagues.

There are times when de Botton allows himself the slightly whimsical fantasising I first so admired about him, and I still wish he'd return to writing novels, but the office has been fairly well mined in literature. A couple of years ago, Joshua Ferris was feted for his debut novel set in a creative agency, Then We Came to the End. I'm undecided whether I don't like his book because it makes me feel the characters are my colleagues - in which case, why read it - or whether he succeeds precisely for that reason. There's a lurking suspicion that he chose ad-land not because he may have worked there, I don't know if he did, but because it may be more interesting than many other jobs out there, whether the day-to-day concerns are the same or not; Microserfs for the new millennium, perhaps, showing how little has changed, or how prescient Douglas Coupland was, in 1995, as he usually is.

Nicholson Baker and Michael Bracewell have placed the minutiae of the workplace under the microscope, in The Mezzanine and Perfect Tense, respectively (the latter being one of the most acute examinations of the modern office you could read). No better portrayal of the hell of work can be found than in Kafka, whose name has of course become a byword for bureaucracy gone mad thanks to such nightmarish visions as The Trial (about a bank clerk). In short story The Metamorphosis, travelling salesman Gregor Samsa fears the arrival of his chief clerk when Samsa famously wakes transformed into a cockroach and cannot go to work.

As much as it's true in life, a character's job may serve as a pigeonhole; more often, it's one of many problems from which to flee, as in Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar or John Lanchester's very funny Mr Phillips. BS Johnson's bookkeeper, at the centre of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (yes, it does sound like a porn movie), keeps stock of his accounts before taking revenge. We might, however, follow the insouciant example of Herman Melville's Bartleby, who relies on one stolid response to every request made of him: 'I would prefer not to.'