About The Goldfinch

“When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature--fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.” 

“What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?” 
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

A big thank you to Jo for inviting us home to talk about The (wonderful) Goldfinch, among many other topics.

Remember that next month, on Thursday April 10th, we'll be at Susan's talking about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Various topics that popped up in our conversations:

• On the topic of blindness in The Gambia here's a BBC article of interest.  Sightsavers is a charitable organization that offers various kinds of help to prevent and correct blindness. 
• I'm a big fan of Kiva, which uses internet technology to facilitate crowd-sourced micro-loans from person to person.  You can learn more about how this work by reading The International Bank of Bob by Bob Harris.  Here is a video where he tells his story of micro-loaning with Kiva.


Another book that I can recommend on a similar subject is Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WooDun.  
• Check out Gapminder for a graphical representation of the statistical data about the world. Here's Dr. Hans Rosling using statistics to consider development in Africa.
  
  
• Canada Reads 2014 was well worth watching.  See if you agree with trending #WabKinewForPrimeMinister
• Just because it came into my mind as we were talking about the burden of being among the privileged try to see Please Give (probably on Netflix), an indie movie that pokes gentle fun at our guilt.