you never just, fiddle with your phone for 15 mins, and the next thing you know, the books sit in your bag or bookcase the next 6 months?

Just read when you want to?

What? App to remind you to read? Is that a thing? I always thought people read when they want to read.

Personal conduct

Please use a civil tone and assume good faith when entering a conversation.

I'd re-read this comment thread a little more closely.

This is a public forum for discussion, and your response amounted to "go Google it" in response to my original post, which was clearly looking for personal discussion with reddit users.

That pattern matches to rude AF in my book. The more verbose equivalent of "LMGTFY"

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I have no interest in changing your mind, but just as a counterpoint, your complaints about "The Goldfinch" (which I loved) are precisely what I hated about "All the Light We Cannot See" - started out strong but immediately lost its way, all flash and no substance, trope-y with no new ideas, the WWII setting gave it a veneer of seriousness that it didn't deserve, and a terribly schlocky ending. There's no accounting for taste, even on major prize committees.

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Could you give some examples of that? I found a lot of explicit parallels between DC, especially in the characters themselves. But it’s certainly possible it’s a mix of both, I just didn’t notice the Great Expectations parts. Maybe it even references more Dickens books that I haven’t read. But I found the DC references pretty substantial.

I found it more similar to Great Expectations. Even the character names are derived from characters in Great Expectations.

Spoiler alert: >!There was an explosion.!< I remember that.

Lets just say I read it and don’t remember anything about it.

It was a rare DNF for me, but that's mostly because I have a very specific and acute pet peeve of authors that center a story around children and cannot write children well. I had a really difficult time getting past that. I do know other people that loved it, though.

What exactly did I say that you didn't like? I'm super confused. Reading IS subjective and so is what we get out of it. It's fine not to enjoy a book or feel like it didn't offer you anything new, but at the same time someone else might consider the same book great or even innovative, which is why I suggested reviews. I don't get why you consider this a hot take.

The lingering invisible damage of psychic trauma.

I agree, the book does delve that cave.

"go Google it" eh?

🙄 aren't you a peach.

Because it was deemed worthy by the judges. Why don't you read some reviews and find out what lit critics thought about it? It's not not worthy of a prize simply because you didn't manage to find anything in it. As we all know, reading is subjective.

I hated it. Maybe I missed something too but I totally didn't get the hype around it. Speaking of shitty but lauded books have you read Ducks, Newburyport? Won the Goldsmiths Prize and nominated for the Booker. 1000+ pages of absolute drivel! A month of my life I'll never get back and I didn't even finish it

I thought it was a really good exploration into the ways trauma can completely derail your life, make you act in senseless ways, and leave you stuck in this hole that seems impossible to climb out of. We watch Theo go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole with each traumatic event until he’s a completely different person, and on a path he most likely would’ve never gone done if him and his mother hadn’t decided to take a quick detour into the museum.

It shows how one split second decision can define your entire life, how it can mold you into a totally different person.

That point, about art, and more broadly the distance between perception and reality, is super interesting and not something that I'd consciously called out. That's the sort of thematic linkage that I hadn't unearthed, but helps me understand why it won a Pulitzer.

Thank you.

Edit and after reviewing David Copperfield's Wikipedia entry, I see it, totally.

I avoid pulitzers

This audiobook was great

Story was great if dragged a bit sometimes

Almost feels shocking that someone didn't think it was at least greatish

The Russian kid

Vegas

Growing up

The bolt

The later in life meetup

The explosion

On and on and on

Great stuff

...shrug...

I personally loved the Goldfinch. My take on the book, is that is an exploration of the question ‘what is real art’, which makes the debate about whether it deserves the Pulitzer sort of meta. There are lots of examples throughout the book, both large plot points and small bits of dialogue, but mainly his relationship with the painting itself >!And how it means so much to him for years even though he literally doesn’t know it’s missing and is in fact carrying around an empty canvas!<. Similarly, a huge plot point of the last third of the book, (which I’ll admit was not my favorite part of the book), was Theo’s forgery of antiques, and how no one noticed until it was pointed out.

And maybe this is a stretch, but I think the ending could feed into this as well. Does something need a tragic, ultra-realist ending to be considered art? Of course, there are many options in between tragic and super tidy, but I think this could’ve been purposeful. And yes, things come together in Dickensian coincidences to evade disaster, but it still feels sort of eery and depressing - he’s traveling around from soulless hotel to soulless hotel, still doing drugs, with the questionable Boris and a big question mark on his relationships with Hobie and Kitsy. It’s a happy ending, but is it really that happy? Maybe this is silly, but I felt the overly coincidental and tidy ending played into the eeriness of the ending as well.

Oh, and I also think this book pays direct and very blatant homage to David Copperfield. But that’s a whole other thing and I’m not sure why she chose that book particularly.

If it won a Pulitzer, and I a pretty avid critical reader of literature don't see why, the safe bet is that I'm missing something.

Hence this post.

Literature isn't always about liking a text, but I've failed to find anything substantive in the themes the book ostensibly interrogates.

What did you make of it beyond just the story?

Which is to also say, hewing back to my ur-question, why did this book win a Pulitzer?

You're not missing anything. You don't have to like every book that others or critics like. Just because a book has won an award doesn't make it amazing for you.

Personally, I really liked this one.