The Bernardo Winery was the perfect setting for our round table discussion of "The Goldfinch". Truly a top-notch waitress, who knew how to serve and artfully ignore us for an inordinate amount of time (were we really there for nearly four hours??!), eased us into a lulling afternoon, complete with rehashing the novel's highlights and themes, double dessert order, and ample time to catch up on each others' antics.
Tartt owned us as readers, with her 2.1 pound hardcover of 775 pages (or 123,324,546,687,099 page e-read) and we agreed, a lot of it was uncomfortable to read. This is not a massage therapist reference. The end was a great reward for all the discomfort and I am sure we will all keep the tale sharply remembered in our evermore challenged memories (nod to TF).
"Goldfinch" was number one in the recent Wall Street Journal Piketty index. Many bestsellers go unread (Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" had been dubbed "the most unread book of all time"). With the statistical analysis done on Amazon "popular highlights', it has been determined that most of the highlights occur in the last 20 pages of the "The Goldfinch". Mix in some non-scientific hocus-pocus and voila - it was deemed that 98.5% of readers finish. "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty (a humble 700 pages), is dead last with 2.4% of readers finishing.
Complete article (99% Piketty):
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-summers-most-unread-book-is-1404417569
We had fun considering the three diverse books Wanda presented for our upcoming November selection:
"Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin" by Jill Lepore
"The Lion Seeker" by Kenneth Bonert
"We the Eaters:If We Change Dinner, We Change the World" by Ellen Gustafson *chosen
Next up: "The Burnable Book".
Please be sure to mark your calendars .... .we changed our next meeting date from August 5 to July 30.
Happy Reading!
LK
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