Disappointment!

So as the founder of this blog I greatly failed, though not in the way I would have imagined. While I someone managed to get through well over my desired number of books, I failed to make very many blog posts at all! So this year, I will read many books and make many blog posts. 200whine is over! 2010 here we come.

1st Book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This book -like my year- was both dynamic and a little bit of a let-down. Diaz does a very wonderful job of creating a narrator with an incredible personality, coming through in dialogue, dialect, footnotes etc. Unfortunately the whole thing is a bit bogged down by pop culture reference, almost as if I was reading Chuck Klosterman. Star Trek this and Anime that, as someone who is a dork I felt that would be right up my alley, but only so many Mordor references can be stomached before a story becomes difficult to find in all the mush. One huge plus was the immersion in Dominican history, and learning a great deal about the horrors of Trujillo Era Dominican Republic. He manages -through the weaving of separate time lines of a single families story- to demonstrate exactly the type of longstanding affects that tyranny can have on a family. I always feel weird with spoilers etc, when doing this, but the books ending is so good it nearly redeems all the things that made it a bit tiresome at times. All in all, I would consider reading Diaz again, but probably not this particular novel.