The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: It's hard to articulate just how much--and why--The Goldfinch held such power for me as a reader. Always a sucker for a good boy-and-his-mom story, I probably was taken in at first by the cruelly beautiful passages in which 13-year-old Theo Decker tells of the accident that killed his beloved mother and set his fate. But even when the scene shifts--first Theo goes to live with his schoolmate’s picture-perfect (except it isn’t) family on Park Avenue, then to Las Vegas with his father and his trashy wife, then back to a New York antiques shop--I remained mesmerized. Along with Boris, Theo’s Ukrainian high school sidekick, and Hobie, one of the most wonderfully eccentric characters in modern literature, Theo--strange, grieving, effete, alcoholic and often not close to honorable Theo--had taken root in my heart. Still, The Goldfinch is more than a 700-plus page turner about a tragic loss: it’s also a globe-spanning mystery about a painting that has gone missing, an examination of friendship, and a rumination on the nature of art and appearances. Most of all, it is a sometimes operatic, often unnerving and always moving chronicle of a certain kind of life. “Things would have turned out better if she had lived,” Theo said of his mother, fourteen years after she died. An understatement if ever there was one, but one that makes the selfish reader cry out: Oh, but then we wouldn’t have had this brilliant book! --Sara Nelson
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Winter 2016 Recommended Reading Selections
Blue by Danielle Steel
Fractured Era: Legacy Code Bundle by Autumn Kalquist
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
January Calendar Girl Book 1 by Audrey Carlan
My American Duchess by Eloisa James
My name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Non Campus Mentis by Anders Henriksson
NYPD by James Patterson
Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino
Spark Joy by Marie Kondo
Spider Game by Christine Feehan
Staked by Kevin Hearne
Stranger Than Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk
The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
The Last Anniversary by Liana Moriarty
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Compiled by FOSL Volunteer
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