I didnt give up and read every word of The Goldfinch and, honestly, hated it. It was an effective story because I read it in 2015 and I STILL think about it, but I don’t like how it made me feel. It was so bleak and I guess I’m not all that interested in stories told from the perspective of young men? Something I didnt realize until I wrote out the list below. Now, understanding maybe why Ender’s Game wasn’t for me :’)
I’m a sci-fi/fantasy girl but also love drama, suspense, and mystery.
Lifetime favorites: East of Eden, His Dark Materials, Hunger Games, Bel Canto, The Book Thief, Outlander series, All the Light We Cannot See, The First 15 Lives of Harry August, The Eye of the Needle
I would love recommendations or even just an assessment of what the hell my brain wants!
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PS. Did anybody get Goldfinch vibes from Demon Copperhead? I’m 6% in and I know its too early to call it quits but I asked my mom (a longtime Barbara Kingsolver fan) if I should stick with it and she said she also gave up
by clumsykitty
2 Comments
Hell yeah, this is my kind of question. I also stuck out all of *The Goldfinch* and absolutely loathed it. To this day, it’s my least favorite book.
If you liked *All the Light We Cannot See*, I’d recommend *Cloud Cuckoo Land* (also by Anthony Doerr). The prose is just as beautiful, but the book is very different. It’s a multi-timeline novel with plotlines in 15th-century Constantinople, in modern-day Idaho, and on a near-future spaceship. So it will definitely scratch that sci-fi itch, but the sci-fi is paired with both historical and contemporary fiction. It shouldn’t work, but it does, maybe because the characters feel so real and the connections between them come together in a satisfying way.
Hated the Goldfinch, but loved Demon Copperhead, fwiw!
You might like the Dark Tower series from Stephen King, or Station Eleven, Handmaid’s Tale, or The Grace Year.
How Lucky, the Lincoln Highway, Lost Apothecary, Mad Honey, Tender is the Flesh, Firekeeper’s Daughter, and Remarkably Bright Creatures are some of the best I’ve read in the past couple years.