Book # 1 in 2013: This is How You Lose Her

I've decided this year that I am going to try harder to write a review on each book that I read (which should also help me keep track of how many I've read and what they are about), and I realize could potentially be a lot of writing.  However, I need the practice and the discipline, and to be able to follow through with one of my thousands of writing projects/ideas.  That being said, some of these may be really sloppy until I figure out a good rhythm and how to write a solid book review.

This is a review of Junot Diaz's book "This Is How You Lose Her."  Junot Diaz is best known for his novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which I've not read, but have heard good things about.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, "This Is How You Loser Her" is about how Yunior, the main character of the story, loses the love of his life.  Yunior is Dominican, moved to the states as a child, and grew up in the United States' Dominican culture.  It is written in a semi-autobiographical form, although I don't think it is necessarily a reflection of Junot's biography.  (In fact, I know nothing about Junot Diaz.)  The book begins with the author expressing the idea that all Dominican men are the same, they have this "gene" that ends up ruining relationships, because they can't help themselves but to love and fuck women.  The story then continues with small stories and interludes of events in his life that possibly influenced his behavior.  At times we see Yunior through the eyes of the women he is sleeping with, which brings a really interesting perspective.

If you don't have a good grasp of the Spanish language, I don't recommend reading this because Junot code switches throughout the entire book (code switching is when you use one or more words of one language throughout your dominant language.  For example, if you use Espanol in a sentence like this, esta es considered "code switching").

This book overall is really interesting; however, it takes about 100 pages before you can really get into the story.  I felt like when this book started to get good was when it was finished, but that is probably just the writing and artistic style of this particular author.

Why not give it a read, it's relatively short and easy to get through if you have few days off.  It took me four days of off and on reading.

Enjoy!

Oh, also if you have any feedback of what you would like to see in book reviews in the future, that would be great.