Matt Compton

Then We Came to the End has been dethroned.

Though the debut by Joshua Ferris is still wonderful, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is the best novel I’ve read this year. At turns hysterical, heart-wrenching, crazy, and powerful, it’s just an incredible work of literature. From start to finish, I read it in just a matter of hours, my attention hopelessly captured by the breathless way that Diaz writes. Consider this one highly recommended.

Diaz’s novel together with Matt Bia’s The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (finished at roughly the same time) puts me at 60 books on the year. That’s 1.7 books a week for all of you keeping count at home.

I’m currently reading Dennis Johnson’s doorstop of a novel Tree of Smoke — which is beautifully written and evocative but struggling to hold my attention after 350 pages — and just starting The Most Nobel Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe by Greg Behrman.