Read Your Way Through Maine

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

In American fiction, my state is code for outpost. Maine is where you send a character you want to get rid of, someone who goes off to raise goats, farm oysters, prep for the apocalypse — or write a novel. Apart from California, I can think of no other state in the Union that lives as strongly in the national collective imagination as a place to play out a festering dream.

I was in my mid-20s, waitressing on an island off the coast of Rockland, Maine, when the actor William Hurt — ultrafamous, at the height of his career — sat down in my section. I’d heard rumors that morning that he was on island, as they say, on a solo “soul-searching” sail up the coast and that his navigational equipment had broken down. He’d come to the nearest harbor for help. That was my first glimpse of the power of Maine’s particular allure. I’d grown up in Massachusetts, and no one ever searched for their soul there.

The standard fantasy is often coastal and involves fog, wet rocks and lobster boats rumbling out at dawn. Our shoreline is vast, over 3,000 miles of it, with hundreds of peninsulas and more than 4,000 islands. But Maine is not all coast. It is farms and mill towns and forests, small cities and suburbs and strip malls that look like those anywhere else in the country, except for the pointed trees off in the distance.

Some extraordinary literature has come out of this state, from all regions. Reading and writing are deeply valued up here, and we have a big, passionate literary community. Even our governor is a poet. Here are some suggestions to start with, but I barely scratch the surface with this list.

What should I read before I go?

Start with “Night of the Living Rez,” by Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. This collection of linked stories came out last summer, keeps winning prizes and is magnificent.

Move on to “When We Were the Kennedys,” by the novelist and playwright Monica Wood, a memoir of growing up in the mill town of Mexico, Maine. Somehow Wood spins the story of her father’s sudden death and the slower death of the once-vibrant economy of her hometown into an exhilarating read, chock-full of love and humor and beloved characters. You will not pass through a Maine mill town again without thinking of the Wood sisters and their mum.

Chances are you’ve already read “Olive Kitteridge,” Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer winner about one of…