Welcome to Read Around Maine, an online book club focusing on works set in Maine. Our January selection is "Olive Kitteridge," a novel of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout.

I'm Angie Muhs, the Press Herald's deputy managing editor/online, and I'll be blogging about the book with Shirley Helfrich, a district consultant for the Maine State Library, and Andi Darling, assistant director/reference librarian at the Falmouth Memorial Library. (Shirley was the impetus behind the Literary Map of Maine, which inspired this project.) We're all looking forward to "meeting" you online to trade our thoughts about the book.

Shirley, Andi and I will be posting blog entries, and we're hoping that you will jump in and use the comments section to share your thoughts too. We ask only this: when making comments, let's remember that we can disagree without being disagreeable. Please don't write something you wouldn't say to your fellow reader's face if we were all sitting together in a living room.

As far as pacing, let's plan on focusing on the first five stories for the first week, Jan. 1-7, and four stories a week after that. I'll try to warn prominently of any spoiler alerts! I think we'll find that pace will work. I can tell you all that I read the first story yesterday while my baby napped -- and I had to resist the urge to keep going, partly because I still wanted to savor the first story for a while.

Now, on with the book:

"Olive," which was recently issued in paperback, got rave reviews earlier
this year, and it's popping up on some of the "10 best" year-end roundups, including Entertainment Weekly's list.

The New York Times' review said that "The pleasure in reading "Olive Kitteridge" comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters." That same idea -- of an unlikable central character -- also is the subject of this NPR piece by author Melissa Bank.

I just finished "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates -- rushing to read it before the movie came out. I loved the book and disliked every major character. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about two books in short succession with unlikable protagonists, but based on the first story, I think I'm going to love "Olive" the book, if not Olive the person.

How do you all feel about a central unlikable character? What books have you liked without liking the protagonists?