Author: Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book for a dollar from Hooked on Books this weekend and sat down to mostly glance at its pictures. Of course, I’ve recently been considering family rooms, dens, and studios, not to mention some rathskellar basement bars, so I hoped to get some ideas from the book.

The book puts me in an odd place; although I remember rooms designed like this, I think it screams for James Lileks treatment on the rooms and color patterns and whatnot. The strangest bit, though, is the people. I can convince myself that some of these environments were warm and inviting and even “neat,” but not the haircuts and dress. Also, the remodeled rooms all feature neat places to hide your 19″ television and some of the more modern studies feature electric typewriters.

Wow.

I got this book as part of the “You Get This Many Books and the Writers Market for $20 (plus shipping and handling” deal from Writer’s Digest Books, and since I’ve lost the receipt, I cannot amortize for you the exact cost of this book, but it probably wasn’t worth it to me.

The cover and blurb say it’s The Wealthy Writer: How to Earn a Six-Figure Income As a Freelance Writer (No Kidding!), but it’s really more How to Run a Successful Business Whose Product Happens to Be Writing Services. Its chapters cover the business aspects of becoming a successful business writer, providing marketing copy for corporations. While that is indeed a mechanism for making a living as a writer (and a comfortable living), it’s not really writing in the artistic sense.

Because, face it, I made a living as a technical writer at one time, and it wasn’t ultimately satisfying in the creation sense of the word. I’d hoped for some silver bullet of a book that would make me a disciplined writer who could sell stories and essays to magazines and books to publishers. Instead, it’s the same hustle to make a buck, build a clientele, and whatnot that I’ve read dozens of times over in any small business owner book, but it’s recursive in nature because you’re doing the normal promotional pitching and marketing not only for yourself, but as someone who will do the same for clients.

So perhaps it’s a good primer if you’ve not read this sort of thing before, but I have. Truth be told, I read a book in high school with a title like How to Make $17,000 a Year as a Freelance Writer ultimately geared to my particular jones which inspired me and encouraged me more than this book. I should note, however, that neither have overcome my inertia and addiction to Sid Meier video games and simply reading to turn me into a writer who earns anything a year.

I bought this book for $5.98 at the Barnes and Noble in Ladue around the turn of the year. You know how it goes; you’ve got a $25 gift card, so you try to stretch it on the bargain books and end up with $53 in a dozen books on the to-read shelves.

I picked this book because its title implies a certain ruthlessness which, as a reputed grammarian, I should appreciate. However, it just enumerates 25 common, obvious, and high-risk grammar errors and how to avoid them. I read the lists, read the supplemental material, scanned the cartoons, and mostly ignored the grammar examples. The rules I break I do so on my own account, not because I don’t know what I’m doing.

It’s a thin little book, a read for one sitting much like Strunk and White, but it doesn’t have the depth of the masterwork. Also, it ends with an afterword that speaks of removing some of the rules of grammar, which sort of subverts the point of the book. I won’t disagree with the afterword, as I have my reasons as a writer for sometimes not putting in commas where they’re needed or sometimes leaving them outside of the quotation marks around the titles of short fiction and whatnot (see also my predilection for the European style here, as my beautiful grammarian wife has already noted).

Still, it’s a worthwhile read if you’re a mere mortal writer (like most of you) and even worthwhile as a reminder of your superiority (like some of us). Worth $6? Depends upon what sort of down payment you need upon your grammatical dominance.

My beautiful wife gave me this book for Christmas in 2004 because I’d admitted to not having read “The Metamorphosis”. Well, thanks to her intervention, I cannot claim that. I’ve also read 400+ pages of Kafka’s non-“Metamorphosis” work, and that’s no small price to pay for having missed a pivotal short story in the Czech canon.

As some of you might recall, I have some reservations about reading translations because I assume that I don’t get everything out of the language that the author put into it. For example, in the Kafka story “The Burrow”, I must doubt that the term for the smaller animals as “small fry” comes directly from the Czech.

Also, I’ll point out I’m not a fan of Eastern European literature or maybe any European literature from east of the English Channel. In addition to the language barrier, I don’t really groove on the bleak, bureaucracy-rules-all worldview that the books tend to embrace. Although, as a liberative, I think our society is trending in that direction, I don’t want to read about those things. I want to read a little about how life can be. Perhaps that’s too much the influence of Ayn Rand’s romanticism.

Some of the stories in the collection are engaging; “The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony”, “A Hunger Artist”, and maybe, to be charitable, “The Burrow”. However, with any roll-up volume, you get padding material, and most of the stuff in this volume seem like that. Many stories are five paragraphs or fewer, with no discernable character development or plotline. Slice of life material at best, but not really worth reading.
Of course, some of the stories really hammer home eurobleakism, so maybe they’re worthwhile to some people.

As I read this volume, I wondered if the twentieth century marked the point where high art became more and more inaccessible. I’ll be frank, some of the stories I had to muscle through (“Investigations of a Dog”) I had to muscle through, and I couldn’t even force myself through (“Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk”). Aside from the stories I read above, I didn’t really get into any of the stories and didn’t really get much out of them. I suspect I couldn’t enjoy the beauty of the stories in their original language, if that’s what makes these stories worthwhile, but the plots nor characters don’t draw the reader in, so the greatness of Kafka lies in….something. But academics have told us he’s great, and they’ve spent their time and energy explaining how great he is. Perhaps his greatness, to their eyes, lies in the fact that normal people cannot recognize his greatness and his academic acolytes must interpret his greatness for the common man. Or perhaps I’m just keen on dinging the people who took the easy way out with their English degrees.

So the book made me better in that I can claim now to have read the complete works, or at least the collected “stories” of Franz Kafka, but it took a long time and some effort to reach those bragging rights. All reading is good and consumption of all ideas is good (note consumption of is not adherence to or acceptance of), but you might better serve yourself to reading only the heavily-anthologized stories of Kafka.

But thanks, honey. It’s a handsome edition.