Andy read and liked Cameron's review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:

"How this book won the Pulitzer Prize AND the National Book Critics Circle is beyond me. It's terrible. Here's the review I wrote when it came out. I stand by this completely. If someone says they read this and liked it, punch them in the throat. (I'm...more How this book won the Pulitzer Prize AND the National Book Critics Circle is beyond me. It's terrible. Here's the review I wrote when it came out. I stand by this completely. If someone says they read this and liked it, punch them in the throat. (I'm kidding, naturally.)

Review of Junot Diaz’s first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” published Oct. 7, 2007
Imagine, if you will, that seven years after publishing "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Ernest Hemingway decided to expand his well-known short story into a 350-page novel. Imagine if, before Macomber is "accidentally" shot by his wife on that safari, Hemingway decided to pad the narrative with a couple hundred pages about Macomber's mother, sister, and grandfather -- tangents that only serve to betray the proper focus of the story, its title, and the reader's trust.
That, in short, is what Junot Diaz has done with "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (Riverhead Books, $24.95) -- a short story he wrote for the New Yorker in 2000, and which, in novel form, devotes more pages to the title character's extended family (and it's so-called curse or fuku) than it does to the fat, girl-challenged nerdy writer who loves “The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and aspires to be the Dominican Tolkien.
Diaz, now 38, burst on the literary scene in 1996 with his well-received collection of short stories, "Drown," which critics and readers both loved. I've been meaning to read it for some time, and when I learned he was coming out with a novel, I figured the timing was perfect: I'd sample his lone collection of short stories, get a flavor for his style, and then progress to the novel. Unfortunately, the library's sole copy has been checked out for weeks, so I didn't get to read "Drown" before experiencing "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which happens to be one of the most erratic, ill-conceived and annoying books I've ever encountered.
The book begins with short-lived promise. We meet dorky Oscar as a high school sophomore living in Paterson, N.J., with his mother, Belicia; his sister, Lola; and his heroin-addicted uncle, who plays a minor, insignificant role. The mother had been born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. The kids' father, whom she met on the plane to the states, took off a long time ago, and the story of his flight from domesticity is about the only case of love-gone-bad that isn't described in excruciating detail in this book.
Crazy love is the family's curse or fuku, which is the superstitious element of magical realism that threads through the novel.
"No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the (bleep) ever since," says the sometime narrator, Yunior, the onetime boyfriend of Oscar's sister, whose name and identity won't be revealed until halfway through the book, and for no other reason than Diaz wants to torture his readers. (That's the only reason I could glean, anyway.)
So, Oscar's personal fuku is that he loves girls, but they don't love him. And basically, they don't love him because he doesn't look like Enrique Iglesias. To hear Diaz tell it, Oscar's the only Dominican who doesn't.
"Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn't have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn't play sports for (bleep), dominoes, was beyond uncoordinated, threw a ball like a girl. Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks. He wore his semi-kink hair in a Puerto Rican afro, rocked enormous Section 8 glasses…sported an unappealing trace of mustache on his upper lip and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded."
Yunior goes on, "Perhaps if he'd been like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe (bleep) would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to."
At this point, we don't who the narrator is or what his relationship to Oscar might be. Truthfully, wanting to know does help drag the reader through the novel. But learning the identity isn't ultimately rewarding; it's annoying.
Early on, the forward momentum of the novel stalls and the narrative flashes back in time and focuses on Lola, the sister, and how she ran away from home in the 1990s; and then to the mother, Belicia, and how she was a star-crossed lover herself in the Dominican Republic. The mother's section of the book lasts 90 pages and covers the years 1955-1962. A wise reader would have quit the 335-page book at this point, because "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" had morphed into "The Bloated Family Background of Oscar Wao." But I read on, waiting for it to get better. Unfortunately, it never did, and the reasons seem clear.
Not only is the narrative timeline all over the place, but important information -- be it dialogue or exposition -- is often relayed in Spanish. Now, I took two semesters of the language in college and yet I had no idea what characters were saying in many parts, because context didn't lend hints. If Diaz is aiming this book towards a bilingual audience, then so be it. But how difficult would it have been to translate the Spanish in footnotes? The book is already rife with footnotes anyway, which mainly serve to explain the history of the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Throw a gringo a bone.
In describing how Belicia, Oscar's mother, had developed a brash attitude as a teenager (while living in the Dominican Republic with her adoptive mother, La Inca), Diaz writes, "Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed perished along with Beli's first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, pariguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre."
Uh, no comprende, amigo?
A lack of Spanish skills won't be the only thing that keeps you from enjoying this book. Beyond its organizational problems, the literary devices in play -- the magical realism, the comic book references, and the fat, supposedly lovable title character -- make the book feel derivative of Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay"), and "A Confederacy of Dunces."
Towards the end of the novel, Yunior, the narrator, is describing Oscar's last great love, a semi-retired prostitute named Ybon. He says, "I know I've thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can't we believe that an Ybon can exist and that a brother like Oscar might be due a little luck after twenty-three years?
"This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix."
Too bad that offer came so late - on page 285. Do yourself a favor and take the red pill now. Return to the Matrix and don't read this book.


(less) "

Andy read and liked Conrad's review of 2666: A Novel (3-Volume Boxed Set):

"A really outstanding read, a book so vast and wide that it takes up a space well beyond its eight hundred-something pages. I found the language in the last book a little too abstruse in places (what, for example, does desperation smell like?) and a l...more A really outstanding read, a book so vast and wide that it takes up a space well beyond its eight hundred-something pages. I found the language in the last book a little too abstruse in places (what, for example, does desperation smell like?) and a little too declarative in The Part About Fate; I have a nagging suspicion that amid the plot of The Part About Amalfitano, there were hints as to the identity of (one of) the killer(s) from The Part About the Crimes - on one of the occasions that someone drives Amalfitano around Santa Teresa, I'm certain it's in a black Peregrino. Some of the threads that bind the text could have been tightened a little bit, I guess. But these niggling complaints are entirely subsumed by the inventiveness of Bolano's prose and his dense, fascinating characterization. Characters in 2666 don't ever appear to have boring thoughts or routine days.

Bolano remarked that 2666 has a "secret heart." This is no exaggeration - the bareness of the sinews that connect the two opposite ends of the book, Archimbaldi and the murders of the women in Santa Teresa, only becomes clear in the last twenty pages of the book or so. 2666 is full of people telling stories about things that they heard and things that happened to them, and even very few of these stories are ever corroborated or given closure. And yet it's not irritating, it just makes you curious. Klaus Haas's lawyer, who despite being well-educated has a lot in common with the whores her client is accused of killing, could have used another 300 pages or so. So could have Amalfitano's daughter. So could have General Entrescu and Baroness von Zumpe and (above all) Lotte, who is maybe the most boring person in the novel but who struck me as more empathetic than all the other characters in the book put together; reading about her was like being given a bottle of water after wandering through a desert for a week.

Bolano has things in common with Musil, Proust, Ellroy, Heinrich Boll, and Gunter Grass; he seems to be to be more strongly allied with the postwar tradition of western European writers than any South American writers that I know of. (I don't get at all what he's supposed to have in common with Borges...) But his style is completely his own. He has listened to Kundera's advice about using motifs in long prose - I kind of want to start this over and reread it just to catch all the patterns I missed the first time around. Why is it so much easier for me to connect bits of Wagner together in my head than bits of Bolano? Anyway, there is indeed a web of not symbolism, precisely, but recurring bits of business that need reexploring.

I don't think I can put this on my Masterpieces shelf - I need to read more Bolano. But I might down the road.

[300 pages in:]
So far, this book is pretty remarkable for being so easy to read. It's like drinking campari and soda - you only notice when you try to stand up. Unlike other books of its scope, there aren't all that many daunting shifts in perspective or a whole lot of self-conscious experimentalism, just a completely commanding narrative voice that ever so subtly implies what the characters are thinking underneath what it tells you they're thinking. I don't think I've ever read such a masterly third-person perspective. And it's so unshowy but so icy, aggrieved, and wise at the same time. And seductive! It's really hard to stop thinking about and in, um, Bolañese.

I'm thinking in particular of this moment when Norton and Espinoza and Pelletier meet in a restaurant, and the narrator mentions in passing that the tables are somehow the wrong size, and would only seat four people uncomfortably. The three have left their fellow academic and friend Morini out of their love triangle and out of this meeting, as always, because (it is implied) none of them are capable of considering Morini a sexual threat or an object of attraction - something that he only dolefully thinks about every now and then. The narrative trick here is that there's no need for a table for four, but the possibility of a fourth person is perhaps meant to perch in the reader's consciousness as lightly as Morini's absence does in the three characters'. If I were writing a novel, this is the kind of thing I would never, ever be able to do on purpose, but which Bolano does so incredibly well.

I could be wrong, but so far, this is reading like it's going to end up on my "masterpiece" shelf.(less) "

Andy read and liked Sarah's review of Twilight (Twilight, #1):

"Okay, I have to say that I picked this book up partly due to all the hype (and partly because it's involved two of my favorite genres)... I mean, so many people had recommended it to me and I finally got sick of hearing about it, so I picked it up an...more Okay, I have to say that I picked this book up partly due to all the hype (and partly because it's involved two of my favorite genres)... I mean, so many people had recommended it to me and I finally got sick of hearing about it, so I picked it up and read it... or as least tried to.

Let me first say that I am a huge romance and vampire/supernatural fan, so when I first heard about the book I was really excited to read it because it combined two of my favorite genres.

But, I really regret ever buying and forcing myself to finish it (I hate not finishing books, even if I hate them), it was so bad. Though, let me tell you that I really wanted to like it, really I did... I'm one of those people who likes a lot of popular things, Twilight was popular, so I figured... I would love it just like everyone else, but I was very, very wrong.

A lot of fans wonder why I hate the book so much and here is my list and it's a pretty long one, so get ready:

1. Lack of characterization:
Bella- Okay... I absolutely hated this girl. She was the worst female protagonist I have ever read about! She's stupid, shallow, selfish and just plain annoying! Not to mention she's pathetically dependent on Edward... I mean, come on, NO girl should be that dependent on a boy, not only is that pathetic, but it is very unhealthy. She was also a clumsy little damsel in distress who was dumb enough to get herself into situations that she couldn't get out of. I would have loved for Meyer to have given her a backbone, so she could have done something useful instead of whining and doing stupid, idiotic things that no remotely intelligent teenage girl would actually do. Not to mention the fact that she is apparently very "plain" looking... if that's the case then why are there several guys fawning over her? She's a Mary Sue, simple as that. And I hate Mary Sues.
Edward- Okay, this boy is just way too possessive and stalkerish (it is not romantic of him to sneak into Bella's room and watch her sleep! It's creepy and wrong!) Oh, and "bad boys" usually, don't sit there and say "I'm dangerous, stay away" etc. all the time.... I also hated the fact that Bella described some part of his body every other page. It was completely UNNECESSARY!! Okay, we get the fact that he's hot, Bella... now MOVE ON!

I could go on and on about all the characters... every single one of them was a flat, cardboard cut-out that did not seem realistic at all.

2. Writing style:
Purple Prose- Ew... to this... seriously, all the purple prose made me want to throw the book across the room. Enough said.

3. Descriptions:
I know I said up there that I got sick of reading about how gorgeous some part of Edward's body was every other paragraph... and if that wasn't bad enough... what's worse than is the fact that even with all that unnecessary description of him and everyone else (though mostly him, since Bella is that shallow) I still had a hard time picturing him or any of the characters in my head, for that matter. I also had a hard time picturing a lot of the setting and the action in my head as well. It's kind of sad really... there was so much description, you would think that everything (Edward especially) would be embedded into my brain, but no. That's what makes me wonder why so many fans find Edward so "hot", I never got a clear picture of him in my head to even begin to form an opinion about whether he was "hot" or not.

4. Plot:
Okay, the plot gets it's own category because it pissed me off so much. I mean, seriously... where was it?! It was nothing but sappy, gag worthy fluff between Edward and Bella until page 400 or so, when something finally happened. And, even then... it went by so fast and was not explained well at all (since Bella conveniently fainted during it, which is such a cop out). It seemed to me that Meyer just threw it in there, and it was only put there in the first place, so that she could point at it and say, "Look, there's a plot right there.", when people like me came around and said otherwise. But that's not a plot!! The plot should not take 400 pages to start! And no the whole "romance" between Bella and Edward is not the plot!!

5. Plot holes
The one thing that drove me absolutely CRAZY was the the fact that no one in the small town of Forks noticed that the Cullens never aged! And the "children" never graduated and went on to college. I mean, if they've been there for more than four years, than I'm assuming that someone would have noticed! I mean, the town could not be full of that many morons! (Okay... I've been told several times that Cullens have only been living in Forks for about two years... I guess all the purple prose distracted me from reading and remembering that little detail...) Speaking of school, why in the world would they willingly choose to take high school over and over again? Especially since they all have several college degrees (which leads me to wonder why, since they are so "human loving" they can't do something useful with their education like Carlisle, instead of sitting on their butts all day and just being useless) I know they need to "fit in", but seriously.. . that's just stupid... they could always pretend that they're home schooled (it's not that uncommon these days. But, I think I know why Edward and his "siblings" tortured themselves day after day by going to high school, Stephenie Meyer wasn't creative enough to come up with any other war for Edward and Bella to meet. It would have made sense for them to have been neighbors or something.

I've been told that there are more, but those are the two that really bug me. However, I love the fans response to the mention of any plot hole, it usually goes like this: "Well it is a fictional book." That's a stupid reason. Just because it's a book with vampires doesn't mean it's exempt from having to be realistic and not having glaring plot holes.

6. Vampires
Like I said before, I'm a big vampire fan. But, this book is an embarrassment to vampire fiction. The vampires are pathetic, sweet, innocent, almost "misunderstood" creatures. I know that Meyer has every right to create her own idea about vampires. And, to be honest, I was okay with her idea about vampires until they started sparkling. VAMPIRES DON'T SPARKLE! To have them sparkle takes away the evilness of the myth of the creatures (since, they are creatures of the devil...). Evil creatures do not sparkle, the idea's laughable at best. By the way, the whole sparkling vampire idea just seemed to be there because Meyer wanted a reason as to why the vampires could even walk around in the daylight to begin with. The idea was just a convenient way for her to write the vampires. Since, she's incapable of coming up with a better, much more creative idea.

All the other myths about vampires are nonexistent. Holy water and garlic won't bother them (just like the sun), stake through the heart won't kill them either, even beheading them won't get rid of them. She made her vampires practically invincible (which is annoying). The only way to really kill one of her vampires is to rip it apart and burn the pieces or to blow it up. Two things that a human would have a hard time doing... which, makes me wonder why, if they're so invincible, they live in secrecy? Especially since (from my knowledge) most vampires don't live like the Cullens, they could careless about humans. If most other vampires were so cruel, why don't they come out to humanity and take over? It makes a lot more sense since a mere human would have a very difficult time killing just one vampire. They also had no weaknesses. They all had these "powers", but they didn't have the bad side effects with them, only the good. All in all, her vampires were perfect.

I don't like my vampires to be blood thirsty monsters that kill everything in sight. But, I also don't want them to be so pathetic and innocent either. The only two vampiric qualities that are there are the ones that are well known among everyone: drinking blood and being immortal. Otherwise, the Cullens are disgustingly human like.

I think the thing I have the problem with the most is the fact that Meyer has never seen any vampire movies/t.v. shows or read any vampire novels. There's this saying in regards to writing: "Write what you know". Stephenie Meyer knew nothing about vampires when she wrote this horrible excuse for a vampire novel. A good author always does their research (whether it's fiction or non-ficiton is irrelevant). This doesn't mean that she needed to go by the other myths, it just means that she should have done a little research to see what she was getting herself into. If she had done this, I would have been able to respect her ideas more because at least then she would have done her research.

Where the vampires are concerned, this novel is an embarrassment to vampire/supernatural fiction.

7. Messages
I am somewhat appalled at the messages that this book sends out.. they are so anti-feminist, it's disgusting:
1. It's perfectly okay to have no goals or aspirations or even an education, just get yourself a man and he'll take care of you. (All Bella wants is to be with Edward, some aspirations, huh?)
2. It's also perfectly okay to like someone because of their physical features... this is not love people, it's lust! They have nothing in common! He likes her because she smells nice and she likes him because he's hot. (Bella goes on and on and on about how hot some part of Edward is every other page)
3. When you have several guys fawning over you pick the hottest one of them all because looks are so very important. (Matt and Eric pretty much say the same thing to Bella on her first day of school, but she as nicer to Matt than Eric because the latter wasn't very attractive. Also, she picks Edward because of his looks as well)
4. It's okay if the guy you love sneaks into your bedroom and watches you sleep at night... that's completely normal and romantic... not the the least bit creepy or stalkerish. (It's completely disgusting to hear girls talk about this. They swoon and gush about how romantic it is... seriously, what is wrong with people these days?!)

8. The Obsession:
Well, this gets its own category, mostly because I just don't understand what all the obsession is over... it's a book, and a poorly written one at that. I run across girls all the time arguing over who Edward "belongs" to... it's pathetic and kind of scary. He's a book character... he doesn't belong to anyone, but Meyer, since she's the one who created him.

This was obviously a fulfillment story that I would expect a preteen to write on her livejournal. This is not a book I would expect a thirty something year old women with a college education to write and actually attempt and then succeed in getting published. And, it was a degree in English... seriously, I would have expected much better from someone who had that degree... since she spent college studying books and analyzing them etc. you would think that she would know how to write one the proper way...

Meyer could have made this book great, but no... instead she took the easy way out: a cliched, simple, overused plot and added vampires to it(as if that made it any different).

Honestly, I've read better over on fictionpress.com... and that's really sad, because most of the authors over there are between the ages of 14 and 26 and are amateurs in the field. Maybe, if Meyer had posted this up there first, it would have been a much better story because the good writers over there would have set her straight. Maybe then, I would have been able to get through the novel, because it might have actually been good!

And, oh just for the record... Twilight is NOT the next Harry Potter, nor is it better than Harry Potter... I say that not only because JK Rowling actually has talent, but also because they are in completely different genres and can't really be compared.

Though, it does make me sick to see Harry Potter even mentioned in the same sentence as this piece of crap... (unfortunately, that couldn't be avoided in this review) and it's an insult to JK Rowling to have her amazing writing compared to the horrible writing of Stephenie Meyer.(less) "

Andy read and liked Nicola's review of Twilight (Twilight, #1):

"I really enjoy lively details. There's nothing better than knowing an author has really thought about her characters and situations, and come up with some surprising and delightful detail that makes the whole reading experience fuller. Lively details...more I really enjoy lively details. There's nothing better than knowing an author has really thought about her characters and situations, and come up with some surprising and delightful detail that makes the whole reading experience fuller. Lively details, you understand -- pointless details are a nightmare to read. I don't need to know that Bella ate a granola bar for breakfast. I REALLY DON'T. (Notice that I remembered the granola bar. I think this is partly because I was fervently hoping it would have significance. Like, she would spectacularly choke on her oatmeal the next day and think, "AH, I should have had a granola bar like yesterday!")

"Show, don't tell" is not the be-all-and-end-all of writing. There's a little thing called summary narrative. It's beautiful; it facilitates plot progression without having to follow your narrator through 24-fucking-hours of a day... and "watch" as she eats a fucking granola bar for breakfast.

I've seen this novel accused of Mary Sue-ism and um, yeah, any character named Isabella Swan seems destined to be a Mary Sue. But honestly, I wouldn't begrudge a semi-autobiographical story if it actually had any of the realism of autobiography. All the high school/teenage stuff honestly made me boggle. Because... that's not what high school is like! That's not what being seventeen is like! Twilight reads like... well, it reads like a thirtysomething who has no recollection of being 17. Bella has all the emotional maturity of a 32-year-old and that's just not remotely believable.

Meyer is not a bad writer. She has the ability to string words together. Unfortunately, she lacks any kind of flair. There was no original description; no truly evocative language. Twilight reads like Meyer has read a lot of mediocre novels and regurgitated the same kind of language onto the page. There is just nothing exciting to the language. The dialogue is awful: not only uninspiring and lacking in wit, but... it's all the same! There's no difference in speech patterns to the characters; no awareness of personal tics. The characterization is wafer-thin (see above, re: Mary Sue). The plotting is terrible: the novel trundles along at a slow pace for 250 pages and then Meyer seems to suddenly realize she needs a climax and the gears shift abruptly and the reader is caught up in a series of ridiculous contrivances that set up Meyer's final set-piece (which, by the way, I saw coming a mile away).

This is such a profoundly antifeminist novel. And it's funny, because I think Meyer has no idea that it's antifeminist. I mean, she has a female heroine! A heroine who reads Austen and writes essays about misogyny in Shakespeare! Surely she's kicking butt for all womankind. Um... no. She cooks, she cleans, she looks after the man in her life! She needs male characters to protect her from the big, bad, scary world! She falls headfirst into a disturbingly dysfunctional relationship with a man 90 years her senior without the slightest amount of worry!

Seriously. Bella/Edward. What's that all about? I don't get the attraction. He has her in his thrall. She is, let me quote, "unconditionally and irrevocably" in love with him -- and after, like, a week. o__O She's consumed by him; she's willing to sacrifice her life for him, and that's... romantic? I just think it's a bit sick, really. You know what I find romantic? Human warmth. Not sweeping, dramatic statements of everlasting and overarching love. Little, sweet moments of connection that ring true. That's something Twilight's apparently epic love story is sorely lacking in. (Did I say Bella has the emotional maturity of a 32-year-old? Well, except when it comes to Edward. There she has the emotional maturity of a dumb dog.)(less) "