Best books… Rachel Cusk
Writer and novelist Rachel Cusk chooses her six favourite books. Her latest novel, Transit, about a newly divorced creative writing teacher – the second book in a trilogy that began with Outline – is published by Jonathan Cape at £16.99
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, 1915 (Vintage £8.99). This is a book all women should read, to find out how we became what we are in the modern world. Lawrence is the great analyst of transformation and selfrealisation, and this novel – about three generations of an English family – leaves readers with the skills to continue that analysis in their own life.
The Magic Mountain by
Thomas Mann, 1924 (Vintage £10.99). This is something of a writer’s bible, and the general reader is often discouraged by its novel-asmountain form from scaling it to the top. My advice is to take it slowly and keep going. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965 (out of print). To my mind, Porter is the most unjustly neglected of 20th century writers; this Pulitzerwinning collection of her short fiction has fallen out of print. The novella-length stories in Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Leaning Tower are among the great modern works, and Porter’s prose style is a masterclass in empathy and accuracy.
Carver: Collected Stories,
2009 (out of print). Raymond Carver has suffered a slip in his former standing as the darling of creative-writing courses, but his writing remains the best modern example of the technical and disciplinary basis
of literary art. I often go back to Carver to remind myself what the rules are.
The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947 (Penguin £7.99). Camus’s novel about a modern city afflicted by the medieval scourge of bubonic plague retains its relevance and freshness as a social metaphor, not to mention as a compelling narrative.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927 (Vintage £7.99). Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is still one of the best accounts of self-mythologising middle-class family life and its oppressive construction of male and female identity.