TBR Thursday was started by Moonlight Reader, and I got the idea from URL PhantomHive's posts. I hope to make this a weekly thing so I can keep up with the massive monster that is my TBR list-- and maybe these posts will scare me into getting more reading done. 

Anyway, the books above are what I plan to read in the very immediate future. None are rereads-- all of these will be brand new to me. Can't wait! 

I've never been to Maine. What I knew about it was shaped by a Doris Day movie from the 1950's about a plucky widow whose lobster business is almost ruined by a greedy railroad Titan, and by watching the Bush Presidents cavorting with their kinfolk in Kennebunkport. So until I started reading novels by Elizabeth Strout, the only Maine I knew was a seaside play land for WASP aristocrats and the people who fed them their lobster. Her debut novel,Amy and Isabelle, explores the tensions between a working-class mother and her adolescent daughter over the course of a long, hot, summer. The Pulitzer Prize winning, Olive Kitteridge, is a collection of short stories set in another town in Maine, which are loosely connected by the title character, a no-nonsense high school teacher with parenting issues. Family struggles are at the center of The Burgess Boys also, but Strout sets much of the action in Park Slope, Brooklyn and the families in distress include Somali refugees who have been lured to Maine as part of a re-population effort. 

Remember Wuthering Heights and Ethan Fromme. Their settings are both cold winter scenes and begin with an outsider trying to put the pieces together, to know why Heathcliff is cold and crazed and why Ethan walks as if he is dragged down by a ball and chain.To know the unknowable. Well, this is how The Burgess Boys begins. Very slow, gossipy and foreboding. Again, we, the reader, are in for a story, a story about a family, a family of siblings, parents, in laws, marriages and notoriety.

So about halfway through this book, I posted that I liked it, I just didn’t know why, because nothing had happened..

Honestly, at that point, I was thinking: Ok, granted, it’s weird that I’m halfway through, and nothing exciting or dramatic or just something had happened yet, but ok, there were still a lot of pages left, so I let it go, and read on, because as I said, I did like it..

So now, that I’m done, I can let you all know, that no, nothing did in fact happen in the last 50% of the book either..

You might be wondering: “Well, Camilla, it’s a 336 page book, something must have happened?”

And yes, you got me, stuff happened, I guess. Like.. I don't know. Looking at the neighbors. Feeding of the dog. You know, exciting stuff like that?

It’s a story about 3 siblings in their 50’s that come together because of one, count it, ONE incident that happens early on. I guess that is literally “something that happens” in the book, but sadly it isn’t dramatic in any way. Any way.

It could have been about Jim, Bob or Susan’s (the siblings, btw) trip to the nearest 7/11, that’s how exciting that incident turned out to be.

Ok, we do also have Jim’s incident 90% later in the book, but again = Zzzzzz…

Nothing happened!

The weird thing is, I did like it, or I liked the writing, I should say. It’s an easy read, and you do want to like the characters, it’s just hard when nothing happens!