Want to build an impressive basketball bookcase for Zoom meetings?

The wall behind your desk has become a statement to the world about who you are. Here’s how to build a basketball bookcase to impress hoopheads in your Zoom meetings.

With millions working from home and hopping on innumerable Zoom calls, both professionally and socially, the bookcase in the background has become a bit of a cultural signpost in the last few months. By arranging the right books in a particular order, you can communicate something essential about yourself to the other participants on the call. Through thoughtful placement, any number of messages can be wordlessly stated and a different impression of you formed simply by the power of your personal library. You can finally make others believe you’re the person you want to be, at least for the length of a likely unnecessary meeting. If, like me, you have a truly absurd number of basketball books lying around the house, here are some you may want to show off depending on the context and what you’re hoping to achieve.

If you want to get hired by The Ringer, make sure you have a copy of Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball prominently displayed. Sure, it probably doesn’t read as well as it did when you were an 18-year-old college freshman, but The Ringer is still an icon and if you want their respect, you’ve just got to swallow your pride a bit and hope for the best. It would also be good to have alongside it the collected works of Chuck Klosterman and Shea Serrano as well as a copy of Larry Bird’s 1989 autobiography Drive (bonus points if you also have its 1999 follow-up, Bird Watching). Don’t show off any copies of Malcolm Gladwell’s books you may have accumulated in your younger, more credulous years though. No potential job is worth that.

If you feel the need to display any fiction, stick to detective stories and crime novels that can be bought at any airport bookstore. It shows you don’t take yourself too seriously and are still a logical, thoughtful person even when you’re not breaking down shot charts, game tape, and trying to figure out if Collin Sexton actually makes the Cavs better. It’s a matter of knowing your audience. Yeah, 2666 and A Little Life are both great books that I can’t recommend enough, but who are you trying to impress here? However, if you want the best of both worlds, you could go with the first two entries in James Kirkland’s Bill Walton mysteries, Friend of the Devil and Fire on the Mountain, which feature Walton and Dave Pasch and answer the oft-asked question, “What if Sherlock Holmes was seven feet tall and obsessed with the Grateful Dead?”

If your “I’d rather be watching a John Cassavetes film” t-shirt is in the wash or you can’t find a way to show off your books and your original poster of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, then making sure viewers and coworkers can see your well-read copies of the two FreeDarko books is a must.

If you want to show your love of the game’s history and lore, have a few out of print books in the camera’s eyeline. You can’t go wrong with Leonard Koppett’s The Essence of the Game is Deception, though some classic autobiographies like Bill Russell’s Second Wind or Wilt Chamberlain’s titular Wilt are also great choices.

If you’re trying to impress former NBA player and current Beijing Duck Ekpe Udoh for some reason, you may want to show off some books that he has featured in his own book club over the last year. There’s a number of works to choose from, but I personally recommend Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Yaa Gyashi’s Homegoing, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, all of which are very good reads.

If you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to Weird Celtics Twitter, forego the basketball books altogether. What you’re going to want to do here is feature as many books by and about funk and rock legends as possible. You’re going to need James Brown’s The Godfather of Soul, George Clinton’s Brothas Be Like, Yo George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, and Anthony DeCurtis’ biography of Lou Reed to start. But to really cap it off get as many books about Keith Richards as possible. While displaying these books is no substitute for posting tweets about Gordon Hayward’s marriage and Robert Williams’ manipulation of the time-space continuum that are incomprehensible to the vast majority of basketball fans, it’s a good start.

If you’re hoping to somehow transition from analyst to executive someday, it may be wise to have a few popular business books on display — stuff that talks breathlessly about leadership and moxie and invents words like try-hardiness to explain well-trod territory in the hopes that readers won’t realize just how vapid and cliche what they’re reading actually is. The title will probably have a portmanteau in it and the text itself promises to misquote Abraham Lincoln at least once. And speaking of misquoting Abraham Lincoln, you should keep a few biographies on hand to again show your seriousness and that you’re learning from the great leaders who have come before you. Make safe choices here though and stay with the canonical, heroic white guys that executives love to quote and pretend to emulate — Lincoln, Patton, Churchill, anyone written about by Walter Isaacson. This is not the time to show off that you own multiple books about the life and work of David Lynch. This all may sound silly, but hey, it worked for Sam Hinkie, at least for a few years.