Wednesday #wanttoread List

Today, and hopefully (fingers crossed for added luck) most Wednesdays I will share the title of a book that I want to read from my growing stack of books waiting to be read, also known as the "TBR" pile. I have one of my Pilates clients to thank for getting me started on the Books on The Nightstand podcast, which I have been listening to every week. This new podcast has subsequently added to the growing list of titles piling up on my Pinterest TBR 2015 board. I listen to their podcast every week, and am always intrigued by their thoughts on books. If you are unfamiliar with Books on the Nightstand, you must check them out. They both work for a major publishing house, and I'd say, have the best jobs in the whole wide Universe! I'm supremely jealous of what they have the opportunity to do every week, and will soon manifest this destiny into my own life. Channeling my inner Dalai Lama in 3...2..1...

This week's #wanttoread title is Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Here's an excerpt of the book:
"Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning—“a modern-day Anna Karenina tale.”*

Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.

But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.

Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves."

Happy Hump Day!