The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Here's Junot Díaz's short story "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" as published The New Yorker in 2000. The story has evolved quite a bit since. I'm only a couple chapters into the book right now, but I'm getting a gut feeling that it's gonna shape out to be a great geek novel. Here's a quote to when your nerd appetite.

Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school. He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close.