Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7 , and could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, 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. Dominican-American Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , his first and (so far) only novel. Kind of like a Caribbean John Irving novel gone nerdy, Oscar Wao is a complex and fragmented story about a Dominican family who later immigrate into America. The main character, Oscar Wao, epitomises a classic nerd, and the sections of the novel that are narrated from his perspective are by far the best ones in my opinion. If you're familiar with your Tolkien , RPG and preferably a wide range of science fiction and Japanese comics, you're in for an intertextual treat...