Keeping track of the art mentioned in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is almost as difficult as keeping track of Boris. Fortunately, Laura Petelle made a Pinterest board of all the art in the novel, complete with excerpts. Start reading from the bottom up, and beware of spoilers.
Theo Decker’s Pinterest
Flying Aces
What happens when two magazine writers publish stories on the same topic within a month of each other? We get to read some of the best long-form journalism of the year. Both Esquire’s Chris Jones and The Washingtonian’s Garrett M. Graff wrote about what it was like to be on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination. Jones’ “The Flight From Dallas” hits 7,600 words, but Graff’s “Angel is Airborne” totals 18,000. Save some time to read both because they’re equally gripping and uniquely told narratives.
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Book Learnin’
“This is the first time that the college has embarked on such a robust process for measuring Core Educational Competency In Reading Things In Books And Writing About Them, and we really can’t do it without your mandated participation. We have devised this rubric in consultation with the Office of Institutional Research About the Institution, which tirelessly gathers data and then enters it into spreadsheets. Please see their Statement of Very Worthy Goals in attachment 6.”
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On Productive Friendships
Recommended Reading: Alexandra Alter on Greg Neri’s Tru & Nelle, an upcoming novel about Harper Lee and Truman Capote.
New Releases: The Classics
With the frenzied holiday season underway, there aren’t many new releases to look at this week, but there are some newly reissued classics hitting shelves. NYRB Classics has put out Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant and Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. Vintage, meanwhile, has smart looking new editions of a pair of Somerset Maugham books: The Narrow Corner and A Writer’s Notebook.
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An Animated Bradbury
“You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. … The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.” Recommended viewing: an animated interview with Ray Bradbury.
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I’m also a devoted reader of The Millions, and I think it was your review that initially pointed me to the book, so I’m thrilled to see my project mentioned here.
I’m not a very visual thinker, nor do I know much about art, so I was having trouble with the scene-setting at the beginning of the book. I kept googling all the pictures to try to get in my head what Theo and his mom were looking at. Then I started pinning them because I thought the other folks in my book club (which is reading the book this month) might also like to look at it. Then I got out the post-it flags and it just kind-of grew!
This is so so perfect. Thank you to Laura for the creation and to The Millions for the share.