New England favorites with a sense of place

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Olive Kitteridge’’ also tenders sad, sharp sketches of Mainers, with the truculent Olive and her kind, beset husband Henry at center stage, living in an old house “lilied with light.’’

As the old joke goes, Maine has two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. So telemark into the blizzardy “Water Dogs’’ by Lewis Robinson, in which three twentysomething siblings brave one Maine winter: a frosty paintball game, hanging out in a fictional Franco-American mill town, and a touch of hypothermia.

This regional deprivation colors Maine’s nonfiction, too, as in the engaging enviro-history “The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier.’’ Down East native Colin Woodard explains how the state’s climate led to its semicolonial relationship to outside interests (lumber companies, summer people). He lights on good topics. There’s the unwelcome 1524 explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who spitefully calls Maine Terra Ondedi Mala Gente (The Land of the Bad People), the 1820 split from Massachusetts, and Monhegan Island as quasi utopia. The Way Life Should Be, indeed.

New Hampshire Read Christopher Johnson’s “This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains’’ next time you hike hut to hut. It smartly chronicles the days of the Abenaki on up to besotted artists like Thomas Cole and writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Anthony Trollope - who famously said the Whites were “superior’’ in scenery to European mountains.