Comments on: Books of Last Year

By: Stanford! « chimney

Stanford! « chimney — Fri, 08 May 2009 02:20:12 +0000

[...] I completely ripped off for this first essay. When I wrote it, I had just read his AMAZING book Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I was completely fucking inspired by it. In fact, I did thank Junot Diaz with an appropriately [...]

By: abi

abi — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:43:20 +0000

Jeff, thanks for the intriguing comment. I for one, having gone to high school in conservative Singapore, would love a foul-mouthed teacher. Oh! There’s an interesting Mozilla story to be told here. Last year, for one of my English papers, I described Mike Shaver’s “ten fucking days” imbroglio when I was talking about the power of open source and stuff. And when I got it back from my teacher, there was a huge red circle around the word. He even marked me a grade down for that! “It is amateur and unacademic” is what he said. I’m still pissed off that fuck – a crucial word in the modern vernacular – would provoke such a reaction. Anyway… yes, the missing quotes (all the time) are really annoying sometimes. You can’t figure out who’s talking to who. But then again, at other times, it’s nice not to have the “he said”, “she told” crap that permeates conversations in some books.

The short story book is Drown. I haven’t read it (I want to). But I did read a few of his stories on New Yorker and found them to be overly awesome. Alas, stories are a matter of personal taste.

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:15:08 +0000

I briefly met Junot Diaz through a literature class I took in college, while reading the book which immediately (or not-so-immediately preceded Oscar Wao. Diaz is as foul-mouthed in real life as his characters are in his books; he’s pretty unapologetic about it, too. Maybe it was accurate to the culture, but for me, that much that consistently over an entire book is more than I care for.

I also didn’t find it all that helpful that he dropped quotes around spoken words so much (all the time? memories faded very quickly); that just made it harder to read. Really what does this add to the story? Immediacy? It’s a poor substitute (or complement, as the case may be) to well-written prose.

Of course, the biggest problem is that I don’t find the stories themselves particularly interesting (I was reading his previous collection of short stories, whose name I can’t recall), so there wasn’t much to look forward to while reading. English classes always frustrated me for precisely this reason, especially when the followup was an essay whose thesis I either had to feign interest in or flat-out lie that I believed in my answer to the question at the heart of the essay. If you don’t believe your thesis is either correct or incorrect, it’s extremely difficult to write something that’s any good.

Anyway, enough semi-venting/semi-ranting about forced literature reading from me…

By: Pages tagged "exotic"

Pages tagged "exotic" — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:22:32 +0000

[...] bookmarks tagged exotic Abimanyu Raja: Books of Last Year saved by 5 others iunfu bookmarked on 01/12/09 | [...]