nomadreader

Welcome to Day Five of My Best of 2015 Reading Round up!  As always, my Best of the Year lists cover what I read in 2015, which includes books published in any year. Today, I'm sharing my favorite nonfiction. Yesterday, I shared my favorite nonfiction . Wednesday I shared  my favorite mysteries . Tuesday I shared  my favorite comics . Monday I shared  Hawthorne's favorite board books . (Want to look at past year's lists. They're all linked  here .) 13. Outline  by Rachel Cusk ( my review ) Outline  is billed as a novel of ten conversations. It begins with Faye, a recently divorced writer with two sons, on a flight from London to Athens, Greece, where she will teach writing.  Outline  is a beautiful, thoughtful, engaging novel. I love the idea of it, and I loved the time I spent with it.  12. Hausfrau  by Jill Alexander Essbaum ( my review ) Anna Benz is a bored American housewife who has been living in the suburbs o...

narrated by Mozhan Marno The basics:  Anna Benz is a bored American housewife who has been living in the suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland with her Swiss husband for ten years. They have three children, but Anna is lonely and has not learned the languages of Zurich. As she begins taking a German class, she also begins an affair with a Scottish man in her class. My thoughts:  There's been a lot of discussion about Anna's likability. I'm not a reader who needs characters to be likable, but I do need them to be interesting and somewhat relatable. Anna is quite interesting, as she keeps secrets from her psychotherapist, her family, the reader, and to some degree herself. And she makes terrible  decisions. Repeatedly. Yet I never became frustrated with these decisions, as I could always understand why Anna  made them, even as I acknowledge anyone else making them would be mad. After hearing Mozhan Marno, one of my absolute favorite narrators, was doing the audio for H...