The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--Junot Diaz

This is a bit of a recap for Friends Recommends. I wrote a post about this book HERE back in February, based on the strong recommends it received. I hadn't read it but still made a post...what a book! Anyway, I bought it in preparation for my trip to San Francisco some weeks ago along with Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh (a good book, but maybe not worthy of a full-on recommend at this time) and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (which I often site as my favorite book, although like a top-5 song list I'm not sure how completely accurate that is). Regardless I have read Perks at least 7 times in my life, and love it enough to buy it for the second time since I lent it to someone who never gave it back. Perhaps a future recommend for that is forthcoming.

For those who need to know, is the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao worth the hype it has received in these parts? Recommended by HSV, Mike Gittings, and indirectly by Jenny Kinniff I would say that yes, with 100% certainty it should be read by everyone who checks this blog. It was an outstanding book...although for me it started a bit slow, but that might have been the mood I was in where starting to read it. Regardless, I put this on par with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Windup Bird Chronicle, and Skinny Legs and All as the best books that have ever been recommended for me to read. Top-notch, A+, prime-cut, top-shelf kind of reading.

I don't really want to go too much into the book itself. If you haven't read it yet my recommend to you is to do so. Be warned that it is heartbreaking. There isn't a whole lot of good that happens to poor Oscar Wao, or anyone in his family for that matter but this is a great book. One small thing that took away from my reading is that my Spanish is horrible, even though I studied it for 5 years in middle/high school. Some of the character dialogue in the books goes untranslated (usually just a one or two-word phrase) but taken in context you can usually figure out what it means. It really didn't present much of a problem, but if I were to read it again I would probably look up all these little phrases to make sure I knew what was going on.

To be specific Heather's recommendation was to listen to the author read this book on tape. She has some strong feelings for this guys voice, and she certainly thinks it is worth a damn. In a recent conversation she actually told me to post THIS CLIP which isn't from Oscar Wao, but it gives you an idea of the kind of voice we are dealing with. She says the speaking starts at minute 1:50 and assures our readers that it is worth the listen. What do you have to lose? Upon listening to it, I could see her argument. It has some nice flair. Better than the voice in my head when I read, that's for sure.

All I can say at this point is read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is worth it. I'll let you borrow it if you want. Mike Ward, I have an Eric and Jessica copy of Skinny Legs and All on my floor. You should read this too...I just need to get it to you. That's all. Todd tomorrow.

*This post was not proof read or edited. Deal with it!

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.