AK Blakemore Calls The Goldfinch 'Silly and Bad' — SkimNews
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- AK Blakemore dismissed Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch as 'extremely silly and bad' after 'staggering through' the novel on maternity leave at age 35.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 'entirely reshaped' Blakemore's brain during her English GCSE, which she called 'as near to perfect as it's possible for a novel to be' for its 'core of white-hot rage' at extreme wealth.
- Selima Hill's Portrait of My Lover As a Horse, bought at Foyles on Charing Cross Road at age 14, made Blakemore want to become a writer after she read the collection front-to-back and back-to-front on the train home.
- Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution changed Blakemore's mind about parenting and creativity after she had a baby in May, reading it 'while my son was napping on my belly.'
- Blakemore said she could never reread Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, having been 'worryingly into' him as a teenage girl but now finding him 'a bit of a pillock.'
- Polly Barton's What Am I, a Deer? is Blakemore's current read, which she called 'a banger' and praised for leaving her 'strangely optimistic about the world.'
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which Blakemore often revisits, she called 'a totally exhilarating, audaciously fun bit of work' from an author who was 'a bit of a Debbie Downer overall.'
Why it matters: Blakemore, 35, finally read The Goldfinch on maternity leave and dismissed it as 'extremely silly and bad.' The piece is as much a candid literary self-portrait as a reading list, threading her new motherhood and teenage Hemingway infatuation through the same frame as the Tartt diss.
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