Reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is like swallowing some kind of bibliophile's lives of past books enhancer or something - it made me vividly recall fictional characters and real people while I was reading. It brought back to mind other books that had similar scenes, characters, or situations that rubbed me the wrong way. Conversely (and most intensely) this read brought back memories of other books' characters who now live quite indistinguishably in my memory alongside facts, and other truthful remembrances. Their thoughts, actions, and failures have become part of the memories I can recall at will but reading The Goldfinch made me realize the lives and my memories of these characters are callable too by new books, movies or conversations that evoke them as if by some spell. 

Reading The Goldfinch took me back to: 
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson, Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and so many more. 

It's 700+ pages of a ticket to the lives of your immersion in past books and that's a ride worth going on if you like that sort of thing.