While the story and characters never really captured me, there was so much that I absolutely loved about this novel. Diaz’s writing style is like nothing I’ve ever read. It is a beautiful cyclone of nerd culture, Spanish slang, high brow diction, Dominican history, and quick wit. It is so rich with such an uncommon combination of allusions that surely there can only be a handful of people in the world world who could immediately identify every reference. And this is part of what makes it great, that Diaz’s voice is so fiercely and unapologetically his own. Despite detailed footnotes on Dominican history and politics (which I loved learning about) there is so much more that I had to look up to understand (even more so as a non-Spanish speaker), or else breeze past with half-understanding, and I got the feeling that this was part of the experience, that Diaz expects his readers to do their part to KEEP UP in the way that anyone being transplanted into another culture would have to, and that he has confidence in his readers’ ability to do so. It is a dizzying, incandescent ride that I would definitely recommend for the pure experience of it.