Thought Train to Pusan

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what my true feelings are on The Goldfinch … at first I had a hard time getting into it (and I thought, “how many pages are there in this brick of a novel?”), but then the majority of the rest flew by and I was captivated as to where it would go next, with only a few patches here and there where my interest wavered, only to then stall out within the last couple of sections and lose me once again. I remember feeling a similar way when I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a few years ago, too, in that at times I wasn’t sure how I was really feeling (though overall I enjoyed it), but what kept me going through both is Tartt’s beautiful weaving of words: I love her style, even if the stories sometimes get away from themselves. The Goldfinch tells the story of a young boy named Theo, who, along with his mother, is present at the site of a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While Theo survives this event, his mother does not, thoug...