#8 The Goldfinch

Can you call it a good book when your thought upon finishing is, "Thank God that's over."?  I didn't hate the story.  It just went on and on and on.  775 pages of on.  Had to 'stand in line' twice to check it out twice {on my Kindle} to get it read.
A fellow teacher said it was the best book she'd read since The Help.  Yeah, no.  Not in my opinion.  #8 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a sad depressing tale of life gone bad.  It made me think about my beliefs ~ and my choices ~ and I was reminded of my more Pollyanna outlook...not as Gloom&Doom like this author.
It's the story of a stolen painting & the lives it intertwined.  Theo's life is destroyed & this painting holds him and keeps him...and almost destroys him again.  It just goes on and on.

Quotes:
p132 ~ pyjamas {love the spelling}

p755 ~ The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy--smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit--was also the old man who'd clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul.

Which is really a great theme of the book ~ What is real?  What makes us us?  What is the purpose of life?  A thinking story...I just was so happy when it was over.

fl: While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.  ll: And I add my own lover to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.