Latest news with #TheGoldfinch
Indian Express
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Caravaggio in India: 5 novels about art to read today
'Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy', a painting believed to have been lost for centuries until its rediscovery in a private collection in 2014, is one of the most famous pieces in the art world. It depicts one of Jesus's most faithful disciples being transported to God's presence by angels where she listens to heavenly choirs. Caravaggio's interpretation of the Biblical story confines the supernatural experience entirely to Mary's facial expression, as opposed to previous artists who had depicted her as physically ascending to heaven with angels at her side. With the piece on display at Delhi 's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, up until May 18, we look at novels that may enhance your appreciation of art, painters and the contested world of commerce and criticism they operate in today. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It tells the story of 13-year-old Theodore Decker and how his life changes when he steals a painting, The Goldfinch, by 17th century Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, after a bomb explosion at The Metropolitan Museum of Art kills his mother. The Collector by John Fowles is the story of a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who kidnaps an art student he is obsessed with and locks her up in his farmhouse's cellar. He plays all sorts of games with her — sexual, psychological and otherwise — to make her fall in love with him. When that doesn't work, he takes it up a notch. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier is about the famous painting by 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer of the same name. It fictionalises the story of the girl who may have modeled for the painter after becoming employed in his house as a servant. It explores themes of class, feminism and appreciation of art. The Raphael Affair by Ian Pears is the story of an art historian arrested for breaking into a church so that he can find a hidden painting by Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. Before he can lay his hands on it, however, it lands up with a famous art dealer, thickening the plot — is the painting an original? Who is the dealer acting for? Moreover, as more and more lives get put in jeopardy, is this artwork worth killing for? Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut is the story of a fictional expressionist painter who calls himself a 'museum guard' and gives tours of his house to interested visitors but keeps a barn off-limits, raising suspicions that he has hidden innumerable masterpieces inside that are original or stolen. One day, a woman arrives on his property and gets the tour, but also forces him to give up his reclusivity and reflect on the art of his lifetime.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
People Are Sharing The "Great" Books That They Honestly Struggled To Finish
Sometimes, no matter how classic or well-written a book is, it might not connect with the reader the same way it does with other readers. On the popular bookworm-filled r/books subreddit, u/myawn asked readers to share a well-regarded book they struggled to finish. Here are some answers that will either have you stunned or relieved you're not the only one: by Bram Stoker "This book is my nemesis. I must have tried it three times and never got even halfway through. Something about the format of diaries and letters just doesn't do it for me and breaks up my immersion in the story. I also find Jonathan and Mina's characters to be quite bland, though admittedly, I never got very far. For the supposedly quintessential novel on vampires, I have to say I was disappointed." —u/myawn by Herman Melville "It took me 35 years to 'get' Moby-Dick." —u/Lumpyproletarian Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne "I bought The Scarlet Letter on a whim when I was in a bookstore. Couldn't even get past the first chapter." —u/Upset_Way9205 Goldfinch by Donna Tartt "I am struggling a lot to finish Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. The weird thing is Tartt's The Secret History is one of my favorite books." —u/-lc- Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens "I really like Charles Dickens, but I can't get into this one." —u/LoneRhino1019 6.A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway "Anything written by Hemingway. I can't stand his writing style; it's just mind-numbing to me. I still remember the paragraph from A Farewell to Arms with the word 'and' like 30-plus times in it." —u/nildrohain454 Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien "I get to Tom Bombadil, and it's too much for me." —u/Rik78 Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald —u/Travis_Bickle88 451 by Ray Bradbury "I LOVE Ray Bradbury, and I know it's an iconic book, and the first line is still one of my favorites ever. It was just boring to me." —u/spanish_destiel Misérables by Victor Hugo "I feel like you have to be in a great place in your life to be able to read this book and not get depressed. I wasn't at my best when I started reading it and stopped when I realized it was only making me feel even worse about life." —u/inps37 Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez "I tried to read it so many times, but I just couldn't keep up with the names and family tree and all the things that were going on." —u/-zandatsu- Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon "I failed twice trying to read Gravity's Rainbow." —u/MrPanchole Quixote by Cervantes "It took me a year and a half to get through it." —u/booksandspace Jest by David Foster Wallace "I'd read it was the most brilliant book. I picked it up in the library, read 10 pages, decided it was over my head or something, and put it back." —u/Charlie500 15.A Widow for One Year by John Irving "Ugh. I'm convinced finishing it decreased my time in purgatory." —u/slackmandu 16.Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter "GEB was huge back in the day, at least among the engineering crowd I socialized with back then. I guess we all pretended having gotten through it…" —u/CalmCalmBelong Aeneid by Virgil "I don't know why because I really liked The Iliad, The Odyssey, and even Metamorphoses, which I would think would be the odd one out of the four. It's just Virgil that rubs me the wrong way. I've read them all at least once by the same translator, so I don't think that's it." —u/ElricAvMelnibone by William Gibson "I've tried to read it several times but never get more than 10-20 percent in before I decide I don't want to read it anymore." —u/mrburnttoast79 Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett "I can't get through The Color of Magic, which boggles my mind! I've been a fantasy reader for decades! I don't like it!" —u/KDLG328 and Prejudice by Jane Austen "I've tried many times with increasing levels of determination, but I can never make it through that first party scene." —u/BaileyGirl5 Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger by Stephen King "It took me a few times to get through The Dark Tower, but I was able to get through it; it was worth it because most of the series is really good." —u/nyrdcast by Jeffrey Eugenides "It has been recommended to me lots of times. I've started and stopped many many times. I think this is just going on my DNF list and leaving it at that." —u/72_Suburbs by Frank Herbert "I f*cking hated it. I despised every single character, and eventually stopped wasting my time reading it and just listened to the audiobook until it was over, rooting for everyone to die." —u/Vanish_7 by Neil Gaiman "I couldn't get through it and stopped mid-way. The main character was just too dumb and Literally every time this guy spoke, I imagined a drooling six-year-old in my head." —u/TheBackpacker2 Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson "I finished it, but it was a huge struggle. To me, that book is everything wrong with mainstream fantasy writing condensed to a brick of a book." —u/Electronic_Basis7726 and Peace by Leo Tolstoy "It was really hard to get through." —u/ztreHdrahciR Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck "As boring as the dirt on their wagon." —u/Damnmorefuckingsnow Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger "My teacher would talk about it so much I had really high expectations for it, but idk, maybe soon I'll give it another try." —u/janepaches33 Woman in Black by Susan Hill "It's not even a long book and should be able to be read quickly, but I just can't get into it." —u/BellePoivron Assassin's Blade by Sarah J. Maas "Everyone I know has said so many good things about the Throne of Glass series and has told me to start with The Assassin's Blade…big mistake. It took me MONTHS to get through, and it's a fairly small book. I don't know if it was the POV, the character, or what. I usually love Sarah J. Mass and her other series, but because of that first book, I can't get myself to open Throne of Glass." —u/SimpleResearcher8334 31.A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin "A friend lent me the first book sometime in the mid to late 2000s, and I absolutely couldn't get through. I found the number of POV characters bothersome and often found myself having to go back and skim through previous chapters in order to remember what had last happened in that character's arc. Combined with being genuinely bored by at least one of these characters, I just couldn't find the motivation to finish the book." —u/DasMotorsheep lastly: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak "I'm studying to be a librarian, and the one that got me was The Book Thief. It's a young adult novel that is widely renowned, but I felt like it was a chore to get through. there wasn't a compelling plot and so much wordy prose I felt like I was reading A Room of One's Own! Wasn't what I was expecting from a YA novel for middle school." —u/rosmitchell0rosmitchell0 Is there a book you found difficult to finish (if you finished it at all)? Comment below and share with me why!
Buzz Feed
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
People Are Sharing The "Great" Books That They Honestly Struggled To Finish
Sometimes, no matter how classic or well-written a book is, it might not connect with the reader the same way it does with other readers. On the popular bookworm-filled r/books subreddit, u/myawn asked readers to share a well-regarded book they struggled to finish. Here are some answers that will either have you stunned or relieved you're not the only one: 1. Dracula by Bram Stoker "This book is my nemesis. I must have tried it three times and never got even halfway through. Something about the format of diaries and letters just doesn't do it for me and breaks up my immersion in the story. I also find Jonathan and Mina's characters to be quite bland, though admittedly, I never got very far. For the supposedly quintessential novel on vampires, I have to say I was disappointed." — u/myawn 2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Little, Brown and Company / Via 5. Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 6. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway "Anything written by Hemingway. I can't stand his writing style; it's just mind-numbing to me. I still remember the paragraph from A Farewell to Arms with the word 'and' like 30-plus times in it." — u/nildrohain454 7. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 9. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Simon & Schuster / Via "I LOVE Ray Bradbury, and I know it's an iconic book, and the first line is still one of my favorites ever. It was just boring to me." — u/spanish_destiel 10. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Penguin Classics / Via "I feel like you have to be in a great place in your life to be able to read this book and not get depressed. I wasn't at my best when I started reading it and stopped when I realized it was only making me feel even worse about life." — u/inps37 11. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Penguin Classics / Via 12. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 13. Don Quixote by Cervantes Penguin Classics / Via 14. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace "I'd read it was the most brilliant book. I picked it up in the library, read 10 pages, decided it was over my head or something, and put it back." — u/Charlie500 15. A Widow for One Year by John Irving 17. The Aeneid by Virgil Penguin Classics / Via "I don't know why because I really liked The Iliad, The Odyssey, and even Metamorphoses, which I would think would be the odd one out of the four. It's just Virgil that rubs me the wrong way. I've read them all at least once by the same translator, so I don't think that's it." — u/ElricAvMelnibone 18. Neuromancer by William Gibson Penguin Publishing Group / Via "I've tried to read it several times but never get more than 10-20 percent in before I decide I don't want to read it anymore." — u/mrburnttoast79 19. The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett Harper / Via "I can't get through The Color of Magic, which boggles my mind! I've been a fantasy reader for decades! I don't like it!" — u/KDLG328 20. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Penguin Classics / Via "I've tried many times with increasing levels of determination, but I can never make it through that first party scene." — u/BaileyGirl5 21. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger by Stephen King Pocket Books / Via "It took me a few times to get through The Dark Tower, but I was able to get through it; it was worth it because most of the series is really good." — u/nyrdcast 22. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Picador / Via "It has been recommended to me lots of times. I've started and stopped many many times. I think this is just going on my DNF list and leaving it at that." — u/72_Suburbs 23. Dune by Frank Herbert Ace / Via "I f*cking hated it. I despised every single character, and eventually stopped wasting my time reading it and just listened to the audiobook until it was over, rooting for everyone to die." — u/Vanish_7 24. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman Avon / Via "I couldn't get through it and stopped mid-way. The main character was just too dumb and Literally every time this guy spoke, I imagined a drooling six-year-old in my head." — u/TheBackpacker2 25. The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson Gollancz / Via "I finished it, but it was a huge struggle. To me, that book is everything wrong with mainstream fantasy writing condensed to a brick of a book." — u/Electronic_Basis7726 26. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Vintage / Via "It was really hard to get through." — u/ztreHdrahciR 27. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Penguin Classics / Via "As boring as the dirt on their wagon." — u/Damnmorefuckingsnow 28. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger Little, Brown and Company / Via "My teacher would talk about it so much I had really high expectations for it, but idk, maybe soon I'll give it another try." — u/janepaches33 29. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill Vintage Classics / Via "It's not even a long book and should be able to be read quickly, but I just can't get into it." — u/BellePoivron 30. The Assassin's Blade by Sarah J. Maas Bloomsbury YA / Via "Everyone I know has said so many good things about the Throne of Glass series and has told me to start with The Assassin's Blade …big mistake. It took me MONTHS to get through, and it's a fairly small book. I don't know if it was the POV, the character, or what. I usually love Sarah J. Mass and her other series, but because of that first book, I can't get myself to open Throne of Glass." — u/SimpleResearcher8334 31. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin Random House Worlds / Via "A friend lent me the first book sometime in the mid to late 2000s, and I absolutely couldn't get through. I found the number of POV characters bothersome and often found myself having to go back and skim through previous chapters in order to remember what had last happened in that character's arc. Combined with being genuinely bored by at least one of these characters, I just couldn't find the motivation to finish the book." — u/DasMotorsheep 32. And lastly: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Knopf Books for Young Readers / Via "I'm studying to be a librarian, and the one that got me was The Book Thief. It's a young adult novel that is widely renowned, but I felt like it was a chore to get through. there wasn't a compelling plot and so much wordy prose I felt like I was reading A Room of One's Own! Wasn't what I was expecting from a YA novel for middle school." — u/rosmitchell0rosmitchell0 Is there a book you found difficult to finish (if you finished it at all)? Comment below and share with me why!
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Helen Fielding Has a Big Collection of ‘Sadly Ineffective' Self-Help Books
With 'Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy' streaming, the novelist talked in an email interview about what moviemakers keep cutting from adaptations of her best sellers. SCOTT HELLER Describe your ideal reading experience. I love a vacation binge-read — I read all 800 pages of 'The Goldfinch' in Greece (that's Greece, not Greek). I also love it when you're waiting for a novel to come out and can't put it down when it does. It was like that with 'Atonement.' I managed to escape and hide when it arrived and read it all at one sitting. What kind of reader were you as a child? I was crazy for novels as a child and teenager. I read several a week, never distinguishing between heavy and light. Enid Blyton, Jane Austen, Jackie Collins, Thomas Hardy — I loved them all. Ironically, the joy was dampened when I went to university to read English. I'd worked as an au pair in France all summer and somehow failed to tackle the reading list. I ended up trying to read the entire works of Dickens in three days. I lost my reading mojo for some years. Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book? I've got into trouble for not reading a book: 'Bleak House.' What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? 'Bleak House.' And I've got into terrible trouble for giving quotes for book covers. My quote once got a bad review: 'There is only one thing wrong with this novel — the cover quote from Helen Fielding. Whilst it is true, it is also trite.' What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? 'Ernest Hemingway on Writing.' It's a brilliant collection of quotes about writing from his letters. I don't know what I'd do without it. What books are on your night stand? I have a little shelf of favorite classics with nice covers, like 'Madame Bovary,' 'The Quiet American,' 'The Grapes of Wrath,' 'The Age of Innocence,' 'Far From the Madding Crowd,' to make me happy and in case I feel like stealing one of their plots. Then there's always a couple of novels I'm reading — I've just finished 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,' and another I'm loving is 'Enter Ghost,' with an Israel/Palestine backdrop. And there's always a self-help book — I have a huge collection, inspiring but sadly ineffective. What's the last great book you read? 'The Great Gatsby.' I'm reading it a lot this year trying to figure out how he did it. It's exquisite. I'm not planning to steal the plot, though. Definitely not. No sir! Whose diaries have you read and enjoyed most? I like funny diaries or letter collections — P.G. Wodehouse, Noël Coward — but I also love newspaper diaries (that's the way I started writing Bridget Jones). I loved Tina Brown's diary in The Sunday Times. My favorite line was from her friend who wrote in her diary, 'Tina came back today … the frizzy-haired fart.' What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? 'Tristram Shandy.' It's supposed to be the first great comic novel. I just can't make myself find it funny. What's your feeling about romantasy? I'm not a fan of over-labeling genres. (This may be to do with Barbara Walters once introducing me as the 'grandmother of chick-lit' — I hope she at least meant 'godmother.') It seems odd there's a snobbery about escapist fiction when people are confident about binge-watching escapist TV. Happy endings are just about where you choose to stop the story. Is there an aspect of Bridget Jones that has never made it into one of the movies, and you wish it would? I always long for more voice-over, and the comedy of Bridget's observations and inner voice. There's a scene I keep on writing where Bridget challenges her Mum about undermining her, and never making her feel 'good enough.' It's a huge moment of realization and change for Mum. I like arcs like that and I really don't like stereotyping older women, but that scene always gets cut. One day. … What's the last book you read that made you laugh? Wodehouse's 'Summer Lightning' never fails me. The last book that made you cry? 'Knife,' by Salman Rushdie. How do you sign books for your fans? One of my favorite things is talking to Bridget fans when they've queued for a signing. They usually want to tell me their own 'Bridget moment' or how a book cheered them up in a difficult time. When I've got a pile of books or bookplates sent to sign, I would never ever use a stamp or a squiggle. I think that would be terrible karma. I love it when I own a signed book by another writer. You feel the connection. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Jane Austen — with Wodehouse mixing the cocktails. That would be a #strongnight.
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
In a world of overwhelming choice, I love the whittled-down book selection at my local street library
I am a voracious reader, but it is easy to feel there are too many books in the world. How do you find the time to keep up with all those new releases? To say nothing of the overwhelm that comes from even stepping in a bookshop. There you're faced with not only the latest titles but also the classics you've missed and the biographies you hadn't heard of but find yourself drawn to. The library is the same – the masses of books too frequently inspires inertia. But around the corner from my house is the local little street library – a small wooden box with a plastic door, holding the donated books of my neighbourhood. If the books have really been squeezed in there and piled on top of each other, it can maybe fit two-dozen books. In a world filled with overwhelming choice, I love this little whittled-down selection. There may be a book I want to read, there may not. But making that choice feels so much easier. The little library provides a peek inside my middle-class neighbourhood. There is the person, or people, who have been clearing out their collection of diet cookbooks. The person who gets advanced reading copies and gives them away. The person who always drops off their copy of the Monthly, a month or two after it was released. I would love to know who seems to be slowly clearing out their collection of play scripts – and in doing so boosting my own collection. I'm interested in the people who drop off celebrity memoirs, the readers of the seemingly endless supply of sci-fi novels, and I wonder if the children have grown out of these picture books, or simply didn't like them. Through their selection of books, I feel I'm getting closer to the people in my suburb. When I have only a limited selection to choose from, I often find myself turning over to read the blurb of books I haven't heard of, books I possibly wouldn't have chosen to glance at in spaces of more choice. There are people in my neighbourhood with very similar taste in books to me, but they are tapped into different circles. And so I find books which are perfectly suited to me but, somehow, passed me by: books like Cho Nam-Joo's delightfully weird novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, about depression and sexism in South Korea; or VV Ganeshananthan's epic and sweeping, but still small and intimate, Brotherless Night, about the Sri Lankan civil war. I get my hands on the huge books that came out a decade ago which I didn't read at the time, and then they faded from consciousness. This is how I come to read Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (now one of my favourite novels), Paul Kalanithi's beautiful memoir When Breath Becomes Air and Maggie O'Farrell's delicate The Hand That First Held Mine. I've read books I would have never thought to pick up from anywhere else. A huge fan of Ann M Martin's Baby-Sitters Club series when I was young, I love finding the odd copy of the graphic novel adaptations (illustrated by Raina Telgemeier), which I can pick up and read in half an hour, remembering who I was when I loved these stories the first time. Going through a reading slump, I find someone has cleared out a big selection of Jodi Picoult. I haven't read her in 15 years, and picking up one I haven't read before is a panacea. (When I go to read a second one, I find I have reached my fill, and turn my attention elsewhere.) Not a huge genre reader, I pick out Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club on a whim for an easy plane read. I devour it and am thrilled to see the next book in the series in the little library a few weeks later. I return the copies as I read them, and I imagine the private book club my neighbours and I are having as we read each one in turn. I still buy the latest releases; I still use my library card. But there is something nice in the quietness of the local little library, the way it connects me to my neighbourhood and to books that aren't front of mind. I drop by every couple of days. I see if the books I've contributed have been picked up; I hope there will be something new for me to embrace. More often than not, I don't pick up anything new. But the books will be waiting for me the next time I stop by, slowly turning over, in this little reflection of where I live. Jane Howard is a Walkley-award winning arts journalist and arts and culture editor at the Conversation
