Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been the biggest critical success of the year, but if you’re into reading books for the sheer fun of it, that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up. If you were only going to read one book that came out in 2008, Oscar has my recommendation and a good portion of the NYU Local administration’s as well. As Lily Q put it to me, “I would have that man’s babies… and I don’t even like baldies.”

Díaz’s prose is keen and flexible, erudite but down to earth. As you may have gathered from his recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Díaz is unassuming, and the book reflects the philosophy of writing he explained to the LAist. “Being against a language form is just as absurd as Canute the Beast trying to order or command the sea.” He’s an all inclusive writer “looking for excuses to deploy all sorts of language.” He employs a compelling array of characters to fit the bill.

The book’s title character, Oscar, is an overweight Dominican from New Jersey who dreams of being the next J.R.R. Tolkein and—NYU ladies will have sympathy here—just dying to get some action. Oscar’s vocabulary will make your proud of your three years of high school Spanish and, simultaneously, the days you spent holed up in your room reading the Lord of the Rings and imagining friends who were as interested in Dungeons and Dragons as you were.

If that’s not your bag, how about the story of Beli, Oscar’s mother, who loved a gangster and fucked him until her “pussy was a mango-juice swamp”? Or maybe history’s your thing. Well, don’t worry, as Díaz puts it, the Dominican Republic is “a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no mount of highfalutin prose can generalize.” His portrayal of the Trujillo era of the DR is both thorough and horrifyingly fascinating. If you’re a little more on the pragmatic side, then the voice of the sometimes narrator and all-time lady’s man, Yunior, should keep you satisfied. Granted, things can get a little far fetched, but you have to remember that your dealing with a self-professed sci-fi geek.

After nine years of work, one has to expect that Oscar, as he is for Yunior, is to some degree Díaz’s attempt to break from “Fukú”—a potentially inescapable “curse or a doom of some kind.” At times, the novel is so much fun that you overlook how finely chiseled and delicately wrought it is. But really, whether you go for a quick or close reading, whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whether a lady’s man or virgin, a sci-fi nerd, history buff, or just a plain old student, you’ll be hard pressed not to gain something from Díaz and Oscar Wao.