Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Curious Expeditions, Oldest surviving figurehead from a Maine vessel, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine

(September 11) A collection of short stories about people who live in a small town in Maine, linked by the presence of Olive Kitteridge in each story. Sometimes the story is principally about Olive; other times she is a secondary character; other times she is mentioned only in passing. The stories are gentle and subtle, and, other than the setting and various degrees of Olive, have only the question "Why are people the way they are?" in common. The private trials and tribulations of all the characters in this town are themselves very different.

But even though they're short stories, the effect of the whole thing is of reading a novel. You feel like you've had a full meal, not just a series of appetizers. It's just that the book doesn't have a novel's usual building-to-a-crisis-that-is-eventually-resolved format. There's no real crisis, no real resolution to anything, no definitive answer to the question of why people are certain ways.

So the book is more like real life than a regular novel, and is such a subtle comment on real life itself, on how we are all secondary or tertiary characters in someone else's story and they are the same in ours.