Olive Kitteridge

He loved her guilelessness, he loved the purity in her dreams, but this did not mean of course that he was in love with her. The natural reticence of her in fact caused him to desire Olive with a new wave of power. Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading my first novel on The Kindle! I am obsessed with quotes from books. I love remembering those little snatchels of beautiful written work, or great phrases, or just great philosophies to read later and reflect on and bring all the memories and the feelings that I felt while reading the book rushing back to me. I have been keeping journals full of my favorite quotes and passages from novels since high school. Now, the Kindle will do it for me. Honestly, I really like the idea of them being in my own journal, so I will probably transpose them into my journals, but it is just so convenient that the Kindle will clip the passages for me with just the click of a button and store them in a little folder titled My Clippings and annotate them with the book title and author and page number and date added. It is just so incredible.

But enough with that, I really wanted to devote this post to actually talking about the book, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. On the first night that I got my Kindle, I was searching for a book to read. I had actually planned on purchasing Perks of Being a Wallflower but since that is not available in an electronic version, I was perusing through best sellers. I had heard absolutely nothing about this book, but for some reason it struck me as something that someone, somewhere, sometime had told me I must read. So, without evening reading the back of the book, I made my first purchase.

This was a very interesting read. The main character, Olive, is an older woman and every chapter in the book somehow links to her life. Some parts she plays only a very small almost negligent character, but in other sections she is the central character and the entire chapter is told from her perspective. It is interesting because the chapters are all fairly unrelated; when one ends you could put the book down and not really need to go on to the next one. It is almost like reading a series of short stories with one common character running through them all. The book is also kind of dark. I don't really know if dark is neccesarily the right word, but Olive is definitely a cynic and it has a strange quality about it.

From the preceding paragraph, you might think that I would not recommend this book and that I regretted reading it myself. However, that is not the case at all. I found myself not wanting to put the book down. Even though the chapters didn't run together with much of a common thread, I found myself wanting needing to know what was going on in Olive's head and in what ways she would enter others lives and thoughts. I actually really enjoyed it. Additionally, the book is very well-written and I found myself struggling to choose just one passage to put on the top of this post.

I haven't really looked in to any other works by this author, but I probably should. Right now I am reading Gone With the Wind and I am 28% of the way through or just starting Part 3(another awesome thing about the Kindle, it tells you the percentage of the book that you have read!)