The latest contributor to
Writers Read: Megan Hustad, author of
How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work.
One book from her entry:
Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. This came recommended by a friend, and it wasn't until p. 78 that I figured out why. From time to time you hear an author referred to as a "writers' writer," and it always struck me as a smug, damning charge. (A sure path to topping out at 4,000 copies net!) Dyer may be a writers' writer, and Out of Sheer Rage may be a writers' book. But few contemporary authors can make me wait for it, and wait for it, and get so irritated with him or her that I audibly scoff, and then finally, starting at the bottom of p. 224, and through the end (p. 232, so not long), swallow whole a rousing affirmation of...well, read it. I was smiling for days afterward. [read on]
Read
an excerpt from How to Be Useful, and learn more about the book and author at
Megan Hustad's website.
About
How to Be Useful, from
The Guardian:
“[A] book that presents itself as a guide to workplace success but that is really a (frequently hilarious) meditation on the notion of ambition…. We could all learn something, she suggests, from the much-mocked American ’success literature’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — books including [Napoleon] Hill’s, and Emily Post’s etiquette guides, and others with titles such as Getting On In The World, or Pushing To The Front, an 1890s bestseller.”
Read
more reviews at Hustad's website.
Writers Read: Megan Hustad.
--Marshal Zeringue
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