The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
(Format used for this unfinished read: Audiobook)
I spent a little over 12 hours invested in this book but there is still 20 hours to go and I just CAN NOT FINISH IT.
Here is a summary:
“Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love–and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.”
I had high hopes for this book after reading the rave reviews and it winning the Pulitzer Prize.
It started off really good with Part 1…depressing but very interesting…
but Part 2 is not only depressing but DISTURBING.
The author writes with detail EXTREMELY wel…
She is so on point with her descriptions that when she writes about character’s incessant binge drinking and drug usage I literally felt horribly hungover….
Like PHYSICALLY FELT ILL, yall.
I don’t need to read books that are strictly “feel good” or “light reads”….
I’m all for some heaviness and deep thinking and even some weird or unusual.
Which this book had for sure…
BUT…
This book had me feeling mentally and physically not great AT ALL while reading and remained in my thoughts after I stopped..
I had like a kind of anxious and hopeless uneasiness just constantly hanging over me.
I literally CAN NOT do that for 20 more hours of my life!
I am a committed reader and usually hang on to a book all the way thru even if it’s awful just so I can know what happened…
I have only “quit” a book one other time in my life.
(If you are wondering, that book was Wally Lamb’s “We Are Water”…that book is told from multiple perspectives from members of a family…one of which is a child molester…and when he started with his story I just COULD NOT CONTINUE…it was so so awful)
But I had to be done with this one, y’all.
Especially after others told me they had to do the same thing when they tried to read it.
My recommendation: do NOT read this. Even parts of it.