My book companion for the last several weeks has been the 750+ page Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch . I’ll probably go through Goldfinch-withdrawal now, not knowing what’s going on the lives of Theo, Boris, Pippa, and Hobie. I really enjoyed it, though truth be told, there were some spots where I felt it dragged just a bit. In the final analysis I thought it was really three books (or more) instead of just the one. There was the JD Salinger-ish first part of the book where Theo inhabits the Upper East Side and lives a life a bit reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, then the book drastically changes gear into a Kerouac or Russell Banks Rule of the Bone -type drug-addled foray as Theo moves in with his no-good father in Las Vegas, then finally in Amsterdam it’s like The Godfather . Tying it all together thematically is the wonderful but diminutive Dutch master painting of the goldfinch, which I’ve had the great fortune to see in a couple different museums in my life (most recently