Olive Kitteridge and Other Books I Hope to Read

A few weeks ago I sat down with the NY Times Book Review, chatted with colleagues and created my own summer reading list. While I will be reading plenty of kids books I also need to feed my soul with the adult variety. For the record, I enjoy both the fluff and denser, character driven books. I'll read a memoir or two as well.

Yesterday I met Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and was engaged by the second page. Set in a small coastal town in Maine where people are a bit more complex then one might think, Strout weaves 11 stories together in which Olive plays either a major or minor part. She is an incredibly flawed and engaging character who you want to alternately cheer for and yell at. Sometimes I judge a book by whether or not I'd like to be friends with the main character - I think Olive would have frustrated me but I could see having dinner with the Kitteridge family every so often.

The rest of my list:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by MA Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen
The Film Club by David Gilmour
The Crowd Sounds Happy by Nicholas Dawidoff
The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler
The Help by Kathryn Stock
Ice Bound by Dr. Jerri Nielson

And if I can get my hands on the new Janet Evanovich, James Patterson and Jane Green books...