
I'm about 200 pages into The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. That novel's intimidating heft had been shelf squatting for a year or more despite a friend's recommendation that had sparked me to buy a second-hand copy in the first place. I finally dove in last week after seeing a trailer for its movie adaptation due this September.
One of its blurbs calls The Goldfinch "Dickensian," and I do hear echoes of Pip from Great Expectations in the suddenly orphaned Theo's tenuous life just starting to open into strange, new opportunities. I also see fun-house reflections of To Kill a Mockingbird, thanks probably to Theo as grown-up narrator looking back with heightened awareness (and vocabulary) on his childhood. One evident difference: The Goldfinch is so far set in New York's bustling cityscape, little like Maycomb's small-town South.
Meantime, I'm also reading 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle, about how these two educators plan and carry out a year of teaching together at their respective schools on each side of the country. One passage sparked for me. In it, Gallagher and Kittle unpack the focus of a lesson that aims to "show students the questions we ask as we encounter confusion with a book we pick up for the first time." Why does this matter? The co-authors explain:
We model why reading is hard at the start of any book. Students who frequently abandon books are often stuck in this hard place. They struggle with ambiguity. They find reading confusing because they never get past the work required to enter a book. It helps students understand why a reader must focus attention more closely in the beginning. (51-52)Their words neatly sum up where I've been in The Goldfinch, swimming in ambiguity, just starting to see the characters and how they connect, puzzling over where the tale may turn next, making predictions of shaky accuracy.
