Junot Diaz--The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I always take special note when something I have never heard of makes its way onto more than one persons Friends Recommend list. This has happened a couple of times before. Mike Ward and Heather also both recommended Conversations With Other Women, a movie I had never heard of, but intend to watch because of this surfacing on two lists. Pretty much everyone had Arrested Development as their favorite or close favorite TV show. While I had seen many episodes I hadn't seen them all so I started back at the beginning of Season One and am now convinced of its genius as well. There are other examples of this, to be addressed at a later date.

I am not sure why I chose The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao specifically out of the repeats, especially because I haven't read it yet. I guess the main reason for its choosing is because of how strongly people who have read the book stand behind it. Since reading (or maybe hearing) TBWLOW, Heather has insisted multiple times that I read it. I'm getting there. I promise. Soon. Also, does anyone have a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that I can borrow? I hear it is good. Mike recommends the text version of the book, while Heather recommends you listen to the author read it himself. Here is a great excerpt from the book, and below is a short plot summary courtesy of Wikipedia. I'll be sure to update when I actually read it.

The novel is an epic love story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the protagonist of Díaz's first book "Drown" and chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels, with comic books and role-playing games and with falling in love, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean (and perhaps the entire world) since colonization and slavery.

The middle sections of the novel center on the lives of Oscar's runaway sister Lola and his mother Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral and his grandfather Abelard under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, various Spanish dialects and hip-hop inflected urban English, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World.