drown by junot diaz

my new years resolution was to read more books, so i asked my friends to give me a list of their favorite works. if they were so willing, i asked them to lend me a book or two. while i still have a good pile of works left, i am currently sprinting through junot diaz's brilliantly written drown. i am not usually a fan of short stories, but i have become fully invested in this incredible work. diaz's language is so lively, so pure, and so fresh that until recently i was under the impression that his stories was purely biographical.

the world of diaz is so complete that it makes me wonder, where is the line between fiction and non-fiction. can a person imagine an experience so fully that it becomes real? there are times in my life when i've so perfectly remembered a situation, a conversation, a feeling but have been corrected or questioned by a person experiencing that instance with me. only then do i realize my own folly and reconsider the reality of what actually occurred. do i consciously (do we all consciously) attempt to create a world of our own that is favorable or more intense than the one we actually experience?

i think that maybe one of the reasons i have such a strong love of literature is because it is transformative. it takes us to new places, helps us experience new things, or simply gives us a unique perspective on an event that seems all to familiar. in a sense, it helps us shape and define our own experience and our own world. i urge you to check out diaz's work (it must be good, the pulitzer went to his new novel), it might even fool you into entering his imagined world.