macaruchi

Great plot. Unpredictable story.

Wow, wish I had read this when I was younger.

Very useful, will start using recommendations immediately.

Loved it.
Excellent balance of stats, facts and personal anecdotes.

Seriously?
This woman needed 619 pages to tell a 250 pages story. I haven't even seen the movie trailer yet but I think this is going to be one of those rare cases where the movie is better than the book.
*shudders*

A very fun and light read. Would definitely read more from this author.

Either I'm too old or too preocupied with other things in my life at this point, because I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. It is a very nice adventure story, although I think Tolkien should've gone a little easier on the singing :P

Very nice story.

Great story, very funny, loved the mini-infodumps on some parts of the book, would've love to see more about the technology used and the aliens.

Rating this book just 5 stars seems a bit unfair, makes me want to re-evaluate my whole rating system and the other books I've given 5 stars to. We need more stars for books like this one :)

Amazing story, very emotional read. After I reached 35% of the book, couldn't stop crying every 15 minutes. Reading the last 25% of the book, I cried all the way to the last chapter.

I don't know why I didn't read it sooner, I had been looking for a tearjerker like this one for a long time. The last book that made me this emotional was The Time Traveler's Wife in 2005.

Very entertaining, the pacing was just right.

I’m finally done with this book. I can’t say that I didn’t like the book, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it either. I didn’t care about the characters at all; the only character I would’ve liked to know more about was Lola, but we don’t get to know about her in the book as much as we get to hear about her mother’s story. I think the problem is that the title of the book and the description about what it’s about is misleading. I was expecting a novel about Oscar Wao, and we only get to hear about Oscar during the first few pages and the last few pages of the book. The author wants to tell the story of Oscar’s family instead of Oscars which didn’t interest me at all.

I think Junot Diaz wanted to express his feelings about Trujillo, Balaguer, and Dominican politics in general and used this story as an excuse. I would’ve preferred to read another book on this topic and have him focus on the story I thought I was going to get but didn’t: the story of Oscar, the overweight, lovesick nerd who wanted to become the Dominican Tolkien.

I liked the author’s style in general, even if I really didn’t appreciate the way he told the story, but I think all the geeky references would make this book a hard read for a non-geek or worse, a non-Dominican non-geek, since what makes the book amusing are all the geeky and Dominican culture references which as a Dominican geek I could appreciate and enjoy (a lot). He tries to be “raw” with the language, but after a while it just gets to be a little too obscene, for my taste anyway. And the constant use of words in Spanish, makes this novel have the following pre-requisites in order to enjoy it:

a)You must be a geek (I consider myself a geek and there are some references I didn’t get)
b)You must be dominican (in order to understand and appreciate the dominican culture references)
c)You must know Spanish (this guy uses Spanish for half of the stuff he says in the book)


I’m not a literary critic, just someone that loves a good story in general, but I would like to know what would make a novel like this one win a Pulitzer Prize. How can a non-Dominican geek enjoy this novel at all?

I will take a break from Junot Diaz and read his other works sometime next year, I don’t want to be disappointed too soon again.

Loved the structure and the story, but felt the ending was weak.

Amazing!

Great story. Impossible to put down until you're finished!