I've just finished The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which puts one in mind of The Holy Roman Empire (which was neither "holy," "Roman" nor "an empire"). Diaz' book is interminable, fathomlessly tedious, the very antithesis of "wondrous"... and, no, the dysfunctional bergeek protagonist's name was not really "Wao," though it hardly matters. Much of the book is in a mixture of untranslated Spanish (in which I'm fluent, but you could imagine it might piss off someone who wasn't, and who'd purchased the book under the misapprehension that it might be intelligible), geekese, and footnotes of book-length duration. It goes without saying that it won the Pulitzer Prize and earned Diaz a MacArthur Genius Award. (I read it under duress from the members of a book club, who all agreed that it had been 300 pages of unremitting agony to read, but might have been rescued by two or three pages of uplifting poignant redemption at the end. You know, even as it's good to be hit by a train if you subsequently find an uneaten Mars bar on the track.)