April 2, 2025

#WinterofStrout Update

I was going to talk about how my #WinterofStrout had gone on so long that it was finally spring, but now there’s a blizzard outside, so I guess I don’t have to. (There are now ice pellets blowing against my window.) After Olive Kitteridge, The Burgess Boys was my next Strout reread, which I first read almost exactly two years ago and adored. And having read Tell Me Everything since then, I love it even more now, and it seems less an outlier among Strout’s novels structurally speaking now that I’ve also read Amy and Isabelle and Abide With Me. It’s definitely a companion novel to Tell Me Everything, just without Lucy and Olive, but with the brothers, and a court case, the setting of Shirley Falls, and a consideration of class. And then I reread My Name is Lucy Barton, for the fourth time (I think?), but my first time since seeing the stage play in November, which made the book mean even more to be and made sense of Lucy’s mother’s character in a way I’d never been able to do from reading her on the page. It’s funny how this novel is so short and spare (which is how I’ve been able to reread it so many times) but I still found passages and points I hadn’t paid attention to when I’d been through it before. And now next up is Anything Is Possible, which I’m so excited to read again because it plots the points in Strout’s universe in a way I’d been hoping Olive Kitteridge to do but it didn’t. It will be wonderful to encounter so many characters in this book that I’m relatively familiar with by now.