I’m currently rereading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (in order to fix it in my mind before the movie adaptation is released next month), and I just stopped to savor this sentence.

The novel’s narrator and protagonist, Theodore Decker, is learning about furniture restoration from a passionate expert in his workshop:

“After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, [Hobie] taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents — ‘sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff’ — spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood.”

Donna Tartt is a secret (or not-so-secret?) scent-obsessive…

Continue reading →