The God that is Sufjan Stevens

I really liked reading the introduction by Sufjan Stevens in "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" because the story was like his songs; random and wonderful! One of the things that really stood out to me about this story is the title, "How I Trumped Rudolf Steiner and Overcame the Tribulations of Illiteracy, One Snickers Bar at a Time." This stood out to me because someone who is not familiar with Sufjan Steven's work would read the title and be like what the hell?! Because the title is so long it might turn people off or turn people on to his work because you know it has to be something good with a title like that, just like his songs. I have listened to his cd's "Illinois" and "Michigan," but this is the first thing that I have read from him, but after reading this story I will certainly read more of his work!

Oscar Wao

When I first started reading "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," I had a hard time getting into the book. It started out really slow for me and all the jumping around of the characters made it difficult to follow. Having some of the book in Spanish didn't bother me too much or make it too difficult because I took a few years in Spanish, so even if I couldn't fully understand what they were saying, I got the general idea of the phrases. I also by-passed the footnotes because although they were relevant to the story, I thought they were sort of pointless at the same time. They were like a book inside of a book and since I had a hard time following the book at the beginning, I didn't want to become more confused and I got through the book just fine without reading the footnotes.
The book got more interesting for me once Oscar went to college and there was the back story of the mother. All of that information seemed more relevant and stuck with me more than the first part of the story and to tell the truth I don't remember much from the first 150 pages or so.
I think the reason why it was more interesting for me is because the book started to be more in the present then giving a flashback to different parts of their lives. I didn't want to put the book down after a while because I wanted to see what Oscar was going to do next, even though it was pretty much the same thing over and over; find a girl, be creepy and fall in love with them, become obsessive and more creepy, then has his heart break over and over again.
Overall, I would recommend this book to my friends because even though it started out pretty slow, "Oscar Wao" became more and more interesting as it went on.