Sunday, May 8, 2011

Olive Kitteridge

The book for our book club this month was Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

This was not one of our books that I really cared for, I did hear that it was a series of short stories so thought it might be interesting but did not care for it much at all. Olive is a character who is very hard to like. Instead of writing a cohesive story tied together with some continuity and logic,  Strout gives us thirteen erratic short stories with Olive in each of them and leaves it to us to form an opinion of whether we like her or not, or whether we know her or not. Each story tells of a different facet of Olive, and these facets compete with each other for our opinion.

This is not a feel-good book; it has no real humor. I will be very interested in seeing what my book club thought about it. Of course it won a Pulitzer Prize, so who knows...

Patricia Cornwell’s wrote eighteen Kay Scarpetta books, if you don’t count the cook book. BARD has thirteen of them, which is expected because BARD seems to take any series like that and scatter its offerings randomly.

I thought I would try other books of Cornwell’s so I tried the three part Andy Brazil series of Hornet’s Nest, Southern Cross, and Isle of Dogs. Naturally, BARD had only the first and last one. Totally different style of writing and I found myself skipping through it as they go on and on. Was just a bit surprised that I did not like it; I thought it might be similar to the Kay Scarpetta books but it is not.

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