The Goldfinch

 I don't even know where to start with this book. It's 771 pages of crazy. Of hope in between despair and love and friendship and most of all, a painting. We start in New York, with thirteen-year-old Theo Decker. His life is changed, he accidentally steals a super famous painting, and then he roams from home to home and grows up a bit broken.

I can't do this book justice. If you read literary fiction, it won a Pulitzer and if that's your cup of tea, you've probably already read it. If teas not really your thing, this would be a good book to start with. It's long, it's dark, but it certainly keeps you on your toes.

"...if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you." - The Goldfinch

Honestly, this is another one of those books. The mammoth ones that span decades of time. Just when I decide I'm really rooting for Theo and the way his world is working, something new happens, and we jump several years forward. And them I'm like, "ew. I don't know who you are anymore or what you're doing and why should I care?" It's like starting a whole new book. So I go read a nice small bestseller that I can devour in a couple hours. And then after a few weeks, I come back and try and figure out what's going on in the book.

How am I going to teach children how to read and be real adult readers one day if it I read only two books of merit a year and 100 books that are as worthwhile as Cosmo magazine? This is when I have to go back to my new Bible, The Book Whisperer, where Donalyn Miller reminds me that, yes, we adult readers have bad habits. We abandon books or get distracted and read other books, and that's ok. I mean, it's not perfect. But it's ok to admit to your students that we all do this. You can be a reader, a good reader, a master reader, and still sometimes get caught staying up all night reading some page-turner drivel that will be turned into a movie that everyone will forget about in five years. That's ok.

And maybe at 27, I'm still growing as a reader. And maybe that's ok too. I don't have to have all of the answers to teach elementary school. Maybe the most important lesson is that no one has all the answers, it's ok to ask for help, and all of us are still learning.

One day I will read a massive tome of literary fiction without disappearing for weeks at a time into bestsellers. Maybe in my 30s. Maybe after that year I finally get off my butt and run a marathon. But today is not that day. (She says, writing blog post after blog post instead of finishing The Bone Clocks. pg 284 of 624. Day 76 of currently reading.)

Water By the Spoonful (5)

"I just remember the instant I saw him, there was just something changed in his eye," Hudes says. "You know, he was still absolutely the same young clown of a cousin I had always known and had grown up with, loving, but there was something different. And I felt that I might never understand it. And that's the simple spark that it came from," (NPR Morning Edition). 

The play starts in a chat room. Haikumom and her devotees make up a chatroom for recovering crack addicts, and are checking in with each other. Orangutan, a young Japanese-American woman who decided to run from her addiction back to Japan to meet her birth parents. Chutes&Ladders, an IRS worker in his 50s. Fountainhead, new to the site.

We also follow Eliot, a 20-something Iraq vet & Yasmin, the family rock -cousins dealing with their aunt's death and funeral arrangement.

Far be it from me to give less than five stars to a Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner, but this one earned it. It was lovely, yes, but it also spoke to me, which it should. And I understood it. Perhaps because I know someone who's struggled with addiction, and I think it speaks truths that you're afraid to ask that person. Hudes also finds a way to be so forgiving and loving to her characters, while allowing her characters to be unforgiving to each other. It's a truly beautiful piece and I can only assume it's a total bitch to stage.

Boston's Lyric Stage Company

I mean, the characters are chatting online...but they're real and present and really connecting to each other, they know each other in that online way, where you can know everything about a person, things they won't admit out loud but feel free to type. Yet you wouldn't recognize them on the street. How do you stage that?

It has just enough heartbreak in it to make you feel human, but not so much that you want to go numb yourself afterwards. And that is what makes this play really beautiful.