Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A flawed but engaging read that has taken me about 13 years to read.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

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I’m not sure when I first became aware of this book, but I bought it over a decade ago, before I met my wife. Before I had much of a life to speak of. Recently separated and having lost a fairly good job in the midst of what felt like a pretty terrible economic meltdown, I was going through my own little existential crisis. Working two jobs that weren’t really sufficient, I was struggling to find myself – to find meaning and purpose, a sense […]

Nice guy ™ can’t get laid. Now featuring the entire history of the Dominican Republic.

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What a great title for a book. What a shame that the book does not deal in either brevity or anything that resembles an account of Oscar’s life. This book was an absolute slog to get through. From the overt sexualization of women to the complete lack of plot there was nothing to be gained and certainly no connection to be made with any character. “The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take […]

Islandborn

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Lola and her classmates are mostly from “someplace else” but now call here home. A school project to draw what you remember best about that first place has Lola unsure of herself (after all, she was just a baby when she left and has no memories from then). Yet, she quickly figures out how to use the resources around her: her family, friends, neighbors and even the memory the island has of her, to capture her heritage. Adults will see current and historical events and […]

Immigrants! We get the job done?

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Getting through Drown, a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, took me close to a month. This delay was due to my very bad, no-good month of January, which included some emotional fall-out after the inauguration and the first two weeks of this administration. I can thus say that the stories in the book can be divided like so: Read pre-Trump vs. read post-Trump. Obviously this wasn’t Diaz’s intent – after all, it was published in 1996 – but personally, for me, the short stories […]

This is how you lose me…(yes, I realize it’s been said before).

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I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sometime earlier this CBR, and I was not…exactly…wildly enthusiastic over it. I felt that Díaz was a really talented storyteller, but his characters were unsympathetic and deeply, deeply maddening. But I decided that maybe Díaz’s writing would overcome the kinds of characters he developed in his novel. I am disappointed to report that his collection of short stories suffers from the same kinds of problems as his novel. This Is How You Lose Her is again […]

A tale of Dominican oppression, of nerd self-hate, and of my ambivalence.

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I’ve heard a LOT about Junot Diaz and his works. Out of curiosity, I decided to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And I am super ambivalent about what I just read. Especially since a lot of parts reminded me of Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents–but with an extra layer of self-loathing. The novel is several stories surrounding the titular character, Oscar. He is a Dominican-American young man who is overweight and geeky, with interests in writing, science fiction, […]



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