Reading The Goldfinch. It’s that good.

Two perfect sentences:

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
(p.93)

“He asked me all kinds of interesting questions, like what I’d read in literature and how middle school was different from elementary school; what was my hardest subject (Spanish) and what was my favorite historical period (I wasn’t sure, anything but Eugene Debs and the History of Labor, which we’d spent way too much time on) and what did I want to be when I grew up (no clue)–normal stuff but still it was refreshing to converse with a grown-up who seemed interested in me apart from my misfortune, not prying for information or running down a checklist of Things to Say to Troubled Kids.”
(p. 136)

Donna Tartt, Goldfinch: A Novel. (Little Brown & Company, 2013).