Impatient With Desire

I just read Gabrielle Burton's comment on the blog (!), author of Impatient With Desire, one of the books I have been planning to read. I'm delighted that she wrote, and for her (and your) information, I did choose to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao first, only because it just seemed more appealing at the moment I was choosing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just a timing thing.

(Perhaps GB's book title is apt...might she be impatient with desire for people to read her book?)

I am about halfway through Oscar, and it did take me a little bit to get into it. The style is unusual, though I like it, told sort of from a friend's point of view of looking in on Oscar and his family. My sad (and very distant) two years of high school Spanish isn't near enough for me to understand all of the sprinklings of Spanish in the book, which is a bit of a drawback for me as a reader. I look up the Spanish words I don't know when I'm near a computer, but so often I am reading on the train or somewhere my computer isn't, so miss some of the meaning. Diaz also uses lots of footnotes, mostly telling more detail about the political situation in the Dominican Republic, which is helpful, though sometimes they are rather dense. I am reading most of them.