The Goldfinch - lost my mojo and not sure whether to carry on

lalalonglegs: "I just found it dreary and soporific where others rhapsodised that it was mesmeric and hypnotic."

Ha, yes. That was pretty much my view. Also I don't really believe he remembered those petty details, I think he just invented them. In fact, I think he just wrote the whole thing and then went back and inserted stuff about draining his coffee cup and putting his cigarette out. Probably had about six set phrases ready to copy and paste, depending on whether he was making a coffee, drinking a coffee, lighting a cigarette or putting it out.

I found it dull and a tedious read.

It's a shame you've stopped because reading about how the relationship between Boris and Theo has changed (which you would have got to soon) was one of the best things about this book, imho.

I quite liked the Vegas section and the return to NY. for me it's the adult bit that I struggled with, particularly the last chapter or so when nothing happens and it all gets a bit navel-gazing and self indulgent. IMVHO, if course

hackmum - weirdly, I didn't hate A Death in the Family either, I just found it dreary and soporific where others rhapsodised that it was mesmeric and hypnotic. I kind of see what he was doing - showing the way the petty details can stay with us in the most extraordinary situations and even subsume those memories - but that's not exactly new and has been done much better by Joyce, Woolf etc.

Apparently, his first wife made a documentary after the second or third volume giving her version of events...

Well, I was a hater and would say jack it in now. It gets worse, not better. The first chunk in New York is brilliant and from Vegas it's all downhill, second bit in New York, as you say, is all descriptions of wood.

As others have said the first part is better than the second. However, it's worth putting up with a lack of editing and plough through to the end. I found its main problem was it was unnecessarily long and if she had sharpened up the revelations it could have remained compulsive reading. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner but nowhere as good as the recent winner by Anthony Doerr - All The Light We Cannot See. That was enthralling, thought provoking and I didn't want it to end.

lalalonglegs: yes, A Death in the Family is the one I read (sorry, couldn't remember its name). It was just as you describe it, though I did dutifully plough on to the end even through all that bloody tedium about the bottles of beer.

I wouldn't say I hated it, but I couldn't quite see what the fuss was about. A lot of the reviewers praised the attention to minute detail, but it seemed to me that all that stuff about which coffee he drank and how he made it must have been made up rather than remembered - because who on earth remembers whether they were drinking a coffee or not at key periods of their life? I have vivid memories of my own father's death, but none of them is related to what I had to eat or drink or which cleaning products I used to clean his house afterwards.

hackmum - I read A Death in the Family in its entirety and was very, very underwhelmed. I got really fed up with the perfectly described, minutely detailed recollections of events that didn't lead anywhere at all (did you get as far as the NYE party and the endless description of hiding and then collecting bottles of beer and which bus Karl Ove caught and who he saw that evening which all fizzled out to... nothing?) The good thing about it was that I could read it almost like background noise - as there were no real drama or narrative arc, I just let my eyes move over the page taking in about a quarter of what was going on and not feeling that I was missing anything at all (except yet more descriptions of how he tamped coffee granules down in the cafetiere or which particular cleaning product he used to sort out his father's bathroom...)

theforce - but Boris, think of Boris.

I gave up

I loved The Goldfinch. I would keep going.

lalalonglegs: How much of My Struggle did you read? I read volume one, and that was enough for me - not sure I can be bothered with the rest. As you say, there was an awful lot of "I poured a coffee", "I drank a coffee", "I put my coffee down and lit a cigarette" type of writing.

I loved the first half. half Didn't finish it so no idea what happened. IT became dull

I adored all of it. Even while the Vegas bit drags, it's because it reflects their situation. Honestly, there isn't a wasted word.

How're you getting on, OP?

Agree that the Vegas section is the hardest to get through. Keep going!

I was always told, "don't be afraid to put down a book you don't love. Life is too short to plow on with books that don't bring you joy."

For that reason, I've just abandoned book 2 in the 'Divergent' series.

Please persevere, I adored this book, there's a reason it won the Pulitzer Prize!

I loved the bleakness and aimlessness of the Vegas section too, his spectacular fuck-up of a dad and his marvellously charmless stepmother but if it makes you feel better, maybe you should know that Theo hasn't seen the last of Boris...

I'm sure I read somewhere that this was the most-abandoned book on Kindle, and that put me off reading it for quite a while. When I did finally get around to reading it, I was surprised, because I loved it and was gripped all the way through.

In short, keep going!

I stopped reading it when he was in Vegas too! Can't see myself getting back into it either.

I gave up a bit later on, I honestly thought it was one of the dullest books I've ever read (and I've read a lot).