The Ambitious Paradox

Stopping and Starting Junot Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

Good book, but my timing is just bad. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="161" caption="The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"]

[/caption] Whenever I start reading a book, I usually have to finish the book, even if I don't particularly like it. The problem with Oscar Wao, though, was not enjoyment - in fact I was really enjoying the book - but simply timing. It is the story of "an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a “ghetto nerd” from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls “the more speculative genres.” He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games — the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit." (from the NYT 2007 review) I really enjoyed reading about his sexual frustrations, his geekiness in the machismo culture hat he inhabited, and the genuine but failed attempts of his friends and family to help him step out of his nerdom. The problem with finishing the book, though, was amply a matter of timing. I decked the book out from the library at a time when I was incredibly busy at work, and I had become involved in a community theatre production of Godspell. Consequently, I didn't have as much time to read as I wanted, and I soon found that I had maxxed out the number of times I could check the book out from the library. I definitely plan to return to it when my life settles down a bit, maybe this Spring, Maybe when I retire, but eventually.