This is how you lose her

I just started reading the book This is how you lose her by Junot Diaz. I am kind of confused with the book at the moment and for two reasons. One because the characters speak Spanish, as well as English and there are a lot of Spanish words in the book. "This is the end game and instead of pulling out all the stops, instead of pongadome mas chivo que un chivo, I'm feeling sorry for myself como un pariguayo sin surete."  I myself know practically no Spanish, even though I took Spanish classes for the past 3 school years (I finally dropped it this year) and I get really confused over the Spanish words and I feel like it effects my full understanding of the book because I don't want to stop and look up every Spanish word I see because I would be looking up like two words per page.


The second reason I am confused with the book is it keeps switching between past and present tense and between different characters and sometimes I'm not quite sure what tense it is in or who is speaking. For most of it the book is in past tense but sometimes it switches back to present tense and I get a bit confused. I wish it would give you a warning of when it is switching tense or it would only switch tense every chapter.

This is how you lose her. About the Author: Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz, age 39, was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New Jersey with his parents when he was six. He has written other books besides This is How You Lose Her. His other books are The Breif Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and critically acclaimed Drown. He is also the cofounder of the VONA workshop, which is the only multi-genre workshop for writers of color in the nation. Currently he is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has won numerous awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Movie

I recently saw the movie version for It's Kind of a Funny Story and let me tell you I was not very impressed. Don't get me wrong, the movie was good except for the fact that it was nothing like the book. A pet peeve of mine is when they change movies and put things that didn't happen in the book in the movie, also when they leave big, important pieces out. That happened a lot in this movie and it kind of aggitated me. If someone who hadn't read the book watched the movie they would probably enjoy it but I found myself shaking my head and saying "nonono that didn't happen, this is all wrong" throughout the book. I really wish they would have stayed more true to the book at some parts, but it is what it is. The characters were what I expected them to be like and I enjoyed that a lot. Overall it was a good movie (minus the few parts that were different from the book).