1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, 2007
“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
There was a time when everyone was reading this book. My grandmother, the woman who coaxed out of me not only my love of reading but my love of writing, read it before me. I lived in Gainesville at the time and she called me and told me she was mailing me something. She told me about this book written by a Hispanic author and how it was this layered story about this “geek boy” as she called him, and that it felt like reading something entirely new. The wrapped package arrived with a card two or three days later and I sat down to read it in my apartment.
She was right. It read like something I had never seen in print before. This was a novel about Oscar, an overweight Dominican nerd who writes page after page of fantasy fiction, and his family, all of the different generations of it, and the curse that was on this family. It had Spanglish and the kind of English you don’t see in novels. It had page after page of nerdspeak and thoughts about how it felt to be an outcast (“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacle growing out of your chest.”) amongst others. It spoke in metaphor, made reference to Homer, and was occasionally formal. It’s spectacular. Junot Díaz is a man in love with not just the English language but language in general, honoring all forms of communication and creating a concise novel that remains sprawling in your mind for weeks after you read it.
It wasn’t just Hispanic people or literary nerds reading this book either. I began seeing groups of little old ladies carrying this book around, soccer moms, teenagers stretching their literary legs, every kind of person imaginable. Oscar Wao is a game changer, the kind of novel that no one can put down because it is a living, breathing document. It exists outside of Junot Díaz now because he has done the exact thing every writer hopes to do: write something that can stand on its own. There are good books that people read and discuss, and then there are excellent books that we lose ourselves in and truly experience in an almost physical way. This is one of those books, and this is why reading will never die because we seek to experience and recreate the best feelings that life gives us in the pages of a book. No matter who the character is, if it’s written well, written as a living, breathing human, we will always find parts of ourselves there.
