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Soon after I started reading this book, I also started reading Housekeeping vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby. In it's preface, Hornby discusses why reading has fallen by the wayside as of late. A lot of people associate reading with boredom because to most, it feels like a chore to get through novels. If people would just read what they enjoyed, then they would begin again to see the pleasures of reading and thus, do more of it (he even makes a point that someone who reads only The Economist and their daily paper every week may in fact be reading more words than him). There's a bit of circular logic to this, of course; how are you to know if you'll enjoy a book unless you start? Along with that, you have many circles that seem to want to claim that unless reading is difficult or a challenge, then it wasn't really worth reading at all.

Which pretty much sums up all the trappings I fell into with Oscar Wao. I first became aware of it when I read an interview with Diaz on a comic book site I frequent. I recognized the book cover from work and said, "There's a comic connection in there? I should check it out!" I did, and the very first line is a quote from an old Fantastic Four comic. Flipping through at random I caught even more references, to the New Gods and Middle Earth and so on...it seemed rife with geeky references I'd get (seriously - how many of the "literatti" would know what the "Omega Effect" was?). I made a mental note to check it out later. Before you know it, this little book had won the Pulitzer. Wow, there must be more to it than just some sci-fi asides. So I finally found a good break to read it. It starts out interesting enough, despite a lengthy discussion about the Dominican Republic's dictators, and I can see Oscar is pretty likable. There is a LOT of Spanish and Spanish slang mixed throughout, but I can figure out most through context. The second section then shifts to Oscar's sister, Lola. She's afforded about equal time, albeit with less geeky references, and I stick through it here because she spends her time in Wildwood, and as I spent a lot of summers there growing up I wondered if I'd recognize anything (something else Hornby discusses in the above book, oddly enough - familiar locations as a reason to read a particular book). The next section is what did me in. Diaz decides to spend a LOT of time on the childhood and adolescence of Oscar and Lola's mother. From what I've gathered in other reviews, Diaz is apparently setting up some themes between all these family members, but at that point I couldn't care less. This was not what I signed up for, and the Spanish comes on even stronger here - I found myself skipping almost every other sentence.

I'm sure there is some beautiful dovetailing of story lines later on, but the reading became a chore, and at that point I decided to take Nick Hornby's advice on how to proceed:"Put it down. You'll never finish it. Start something else."
And there's nothing wrong with that.