Reading in bare feet

Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer (IQ84,The Wind Up Bird Chronicle etc.)= Brautigan, Dostoevsky, and Arthur Clark. Just when I see one of these writers in Murakami's writing I see another. This creates a kind of entertainment that supercedes the narrative, which, I suspect, is a sort of narrative trick in itself, not that a trick once in awhile from a novelist is a bad thing; Murakami's a serious popular writer who's easy to read, easier that is than another serious popular writer, Donna Tartt.

Of Donna Tartt, not enough unpopular things can be said. I first saw her wildly popular novel, The Goldfinch (2013) in an airport giftshop and my engagement with the book went from there, which is to say nowhere. Stacks of The Goldfinch were displayed standing up at attention in the giftshop's window, and stacks of the book were offered for sale on a table inside. Being an aficionado of wildly unpopular fiction, I knew immediately that the Tartt novel wasn't for me, though I did look at the first and last lines of the book--one of my little intuitive literary litmus tests--lifting it above my head a couple of times (all 771 pps., plus) needing the exercise. The prose in The Goldfinch, that is what I did read, seemed writerly, the kind of prose I tend to resist. 

2017, I join a bookclub, eight other guys, each far more intelligent than me, accomplished, well read, two of them writers themselves. We meet monthly; the book for the next meeting is chosen by the host of the meeting at the time. I hosted last month; I chose Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, thinking it might pertain to our immediate political time (it didn't particularly), and cherishing its brevity (46 pps.)

We met the other night in Berkeley to discuss Civil Disobedience, and had a lively discussion about whether or nor to pay our poll taxes, what it might be like to spend a night or two in jail, Thoreau's dependence on his mother, and what he and Emerson might have made of Paul Ryan, among other things.

When it was time to get up and leave, our host, S__________ proposed that we read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. His proposal was seconded, and went to a vote: 7 yea, 2 nay. 

I don't know what to do, though I do appreciate the quandry: to read The Goldfinch or to resist?