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...

The backstory: Outline  is on the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction longlist. It's also shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize . The basics: 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. My thoughts: Outline  is very much a novel of ideas. There is no real plot to speak of, and its main character is the titular outline--we get but an outline of her through her interactions with strangers and friends alike. Still, I found it was a more cohesive story than I expected. Because it was billed as a novel of ten conversations, I made the mistaken assumption that these ten conversations would be with ten different people (spoiler: they're not.) While we only see some characters once, other appear several times, which helps ground the narrative and makes it feel more like a novel than a chronological series of short stories. As...