Perhaps Donna Tartt skews a little mainstream for PBR Book Club, BUT her new novel The Goldfinch is long and it is literary and there's a good chance that people will actually read and (blasphemy) enjoy it. So it's our November selection.
The meeting is currently slated for Tues. Dec. 3.
Mr. Stephen King extolls the problems and pleasures of long novels in his very positive NY-Times review of The Goldfinch:
“The Goldfinch” is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of “The Goldfinch,” they never do."
That egghead Mr. James Wood, in the New Yorker, is a little (okay, a lot) less kind, wishing that the novel was stripped of all its Dickensian trappings (and virtually every plot point) to focus on one single character:
"Through all this thrashing, twisting, gulping, choking, gasping, coughing, cursing, plunging, sputtering, and floundering, I kept on trying to imagine a different novel, stripped of its unreasonable raison d'etre and its childish sweets, a more rigorous fiction entitled, perhaps, not The Goldfinch, but just Theo Decker."
Are you in Team King or Team Wood? Let's find out.
Also, look for book club members out and about in LFK and ask them sweetly for PBR Book Club merch such as koozies and stickers. Keep those PBRs nice and cozy this winter while you read.
Donna Tartt:
What a babe.
ReplyDeleteI knew you'd like that photo with the dog, Beth Beavers!
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