Reflective Thinking – WIP oil portrait painting

Reflective Thinking
oil portrait painting
Available here

What I’m reading: Finished The Secret History by Donna Tartt early this morning. It kinda makes me wish I had stuck with Little Friend when I tried to read it a year or so ago, but nah..I’m good. Two outta three ain’t bad, and this book was her best, I think. 

Now I’m speeding along a book by Fredrik Backman called Anxious People. I have a feeling it will be a fast read because so far the characters are being described very nicely, and easy to remember. The Secret History didn’t really get going for me for several chapters/days because I couldn’t keep the characters straight in my head. I don’t know if it was the writing or I didn’t pay enough attention to the beginning of the book. I noticed other people online were having trouble, also. I don’t recommend searching around too much because I ran into a bunch of spoilers with no warnings, which kinda ruined it for me. :/ My advice if you have plans to read this book is to jot down names and descriptions as you’re reading, at least in the beginning. I think it would have read faster if I had done that. I would have spent less time backtracking. 

Anxious People has super short chapters which is attractive to me..like only 3 or 4 minutes long. I can read one or two chapters while cooking dinner, and feel like I’m accomplishing something. It’s kinda refreshing since The Secret History had extremely long chapters, and required a serious commitment of sitting still for great periods of time. I get antsy if things are going to take a lot of time and focus, so short chapters are best. I’m kinda surprised that I stuck with The Secret History, but I’m glad I did. Like Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch, this one will stay with me for a while.