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Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, loosely tied together through their association with Olive Kitteridge, the title character and former high school math teacher. I started reading it after book club last week because one of the members recommended it highly. I downloaded it without reading reviews first, and shortly afterward received this email from my husband who noticed the book on our joint Kindle account: Nice pick, Happy McCheery!

I’m not writing a review of the book because even though it’s beautiful in the way that Art can illuminate The Human Experience, it’s still depressing and I don’t feel like paging through it again. Dysfunctional does not begin to describe the relationships in this town, and its inhabitants suffer from a seemingly endless run of bad luck, tragedy, and heartbreak.

However, Olive Kitteridge did bring to mind two other books, one very similar in structure and theme and the other completely different but highly relevant. First, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, which I first read in high school. Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio also takes the form a series of interconnected short stories about the residents of a small town, this one in the Midwest. That the characters, who are recalled by an old writer in the prologue, are summed up as “grotesques” should tell you something. When I finished Olive Kitteridge, I downloaded Winesburg to read it again. Winesburg and Olive center on the effort, a century apart, by characters in small-town America to understand a rapidly changing world and the pain of surviving, let alone thriving, in isolation from the world around you.

And that brings me to the other book I read recently, the funny yet thoughtful and informative The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. Weiner, a self-professed unhappy man and foreign correspondent for NPR, recounts his attempt to understand happiness by going where people are quantifiably happier (yes, there is a Happiness Index): Switzerland, Iceland, Qatar, India, Thailand, and Bhutan. He also spends time in Moldova and a small town outside London where the original version of The Office was set. In the end, what makes people happy, he concludes after consulting ancient philosophers, modern-day gurus and happiness scientists, are relationships. No wonder the grotesques of Crosby and Winesburg didn’t stand a chance.