Love Is a Mix Tape

I'm almost done with Love Is a Mix Tape. I've been enjoying it. I felt compelled to buy and listen to Nirvana's In Utero yesterday after Rob described it has better than Nevermind because it reminded him of what he was going through as a husband. And then I got to the section where his wife dies unexpectedly, which is heartbreaking. I think he captured well the pure shock of what happened.

Love Is a Mix Tape

Friday I started reading Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. This is Sheffield's memoir, about his life in general, but mostly his relationship with his wife Renee, who died unexpectedly in 1997 after they'd been together only 8 years. So far the tone is fun and upbeat, although surely it will be taking a darker turn later. Each chapter starts with the playlist of a mix tape he or Renee made and recalls that time of his life, frequently with references to the songs on the tape. If you are a music fan, and particularly a mix tape maker (and clearly, given that this is my other blog, I assure you I was), then this aspect of the story should appeal to you. I had boxes of mixes when I was a kid, which later became mix CDs, and now recently iTunes playlists.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I just read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The book was this year's Pulitzer fiction winner. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book starts by introducing the title character Oscar de Leon ("Oscar Wao" was a nickname he picked up, a reworking of "Oscar Wild'). Oscar was a very nerdy kid--overweight, into science fiction, very into girls but so awkward around them. From there the book works backwards, telling the stories of all of Oscar's family, including his sister, mother and grandfather. I didn't expect this, and I liked it quite a bit, for the narrative unfolds as a history of an immigrant family's past. Once a great family in the Dominican Trujillo dictatorship, the family suffered quite a fall, theorized as the result of a curse--or fuku--placed on the family. The narrator at first seems like third person, although we later learn he is Oscar's college roommate and his sister's boyfriend. There is one deviation of this though--the sister gets to tell her story from first person, which is interesting. Reflecting back it's like the author wanted us to know that the boyfriend didn't ever know her well enough to tell her story, which is fitting.

The book has a lot of Spanish in it, particularly for the profanity and sexual descriptions (of which there is quite a bit). There are numerous footnotes, most of which serve to fill in factual details of Dominican culture and history--through the narrator's very opinionated viewpoint of course. Science fiction/fantasy references abound, particularly to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Trek. Here's a great line from one footnote, the components of which you may or may not recognize depending on your Sci-Fi/Fantasy lit: "Outer Azua is one of the pporest areas in the DR....the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine." The only ones I got were the last two--Star Trek II, and Star Wars.

(Spoiler, maybe) The ending gets a bit tedious. Given the title and the cover picture, I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that Oscar is destined to meet his maker early. The process of getting us there--once it's obvious how it will happen--involves Oscar stalking an old Dominican prostitute he's fallen in love with, who happens to be married to a mean-tempered policeman. Yikes.

Lush Life

I finished Lush Life. While I enjoyed it, I was a bit disappointed, only because I liked Samaritan so much. Where this book suffers was in doing too much. Samaritan was a much simpler story and was better for it. It focused on two interesting and compelling main characters. Lush Life had about six main characters: the lead cop, his partner, the victim's coworker/key witness, the victim's father, the victim's father's wife, the perpetrator, and a roving band of "quality of life" cops. Particularly near the end, Price keeps jumping between all these various elements, sometimes with unnecessary detours. One of the main characters, a youngish restaurant manager who was the victim's supervisor (the victim was the bartender) and was with him when he was killed, wasn't very interesting. He just seemed like a real jerk; taking advantage of his mentor-type boss to try to deal coke in the restaurant while sleeping with one of the waitresses he cares nothing about. He also holds up the investigation after being wrongly accused of the crime (his gut-wrenching initial interrogation is very well written, perhaps the book's best moment). I really liked the main cop's Latina female partner. She came from a poor neighborhood and worked her way out of it. She therefore has more empathy (not necessarily sympathy) for the denizens of the communities in which they generally work. I wish she'd had more time in the book.

Sorry

I didn't mean to neglect this blog. I'll make up for it right now.