by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 10, 2008 | reviews |
On my list of top ten all-time favorite books is a book I read in 2000, The Half-Life of Happiness by John Casey. It’s a novel about a marriage and a family, but I haven’t read it since then and can no longer remember any specifics. My yellow highlights,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 8, 2008 | reviews, shapes, truth |
Rachel Cusk’s fourth book is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. My favorite line, because of the unwritten premise, comes in the Introduction, where she writes, “…so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 28, 2008 | details, journeys, reviews |
The Country Life, published in 1997, is Rachel Cusk’s third novel. She is spacing them out like children–one every two years. As opposed to The Temporary, the writing is solid throughout, continuously propelling the reader forward. The first sentence...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 25, 2008 | reviews, shapes |
With her first novel, Saving Agnes, Rachel Cusk laid the foundation for her writing life. The Temporary is her second novel. It was published in 1995, two years after her first. And I see improvement. The author is using fewer words, and in places, she goes...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 24, 2008 | first novels, reviews |
In July, I read Arlington Park and discovered a writer new to me–Rachel Cusk. She was born in Canada in 1967, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives in England. Arlington Park is her most recent novel. Although I thought it was slightly brusque in its movement...