Reading Itself is the Comfort: Junot Díaz

The Hindu

03-08-2025

Published : Aug 03, 2025 11:04 IST - 8 MINS READ
Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, US, Junot Díaz is the author of four books, including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Over his career, Díaz has been awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Díaz is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a MacArthur fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a child, Díaz recalls how he once retrieved free books with a shopping cart, which sparked his initial curiosity and love for literature from an early age. From his childhood influences of reading science fiction and dystopian authors like Richard Adams, Isaac Asimov, and especially John Christopher, Díaz was drawn to works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others, during his college years at Rutgers and Cornell. These authors and the books they wrote for a time of reading and not our age of screens, he says, had an intense focus which is distinct from today's digital age.
In this interview, Junot Díaz discusses his lifelong relationship with books and reading that has shaped his journey as an immigrant. He explains why he sees himself as a reader first, reflects on the humanising joy literature has brought him, and how navigating two cultures through books has helped him integrate memory and consciousness into his writing. Edited excerpts:
Give us a sense of your relationship with books and reading, given your journey from Santo Domingo to New Jersey, and how your writing is influenced by both Dominican and American cultures?
Best answer to that vastness is to hand you my four books (this includes my children's book Islandborn). I do not have any real encompassing sense of the impact of the Dominican Republic and the US on me—only my struggle to understand these impacts which play out in my literature. My brain cannot hold it all but literature—as a technology of consciousness of memory of sentience sapience of experience—can.
I am a reader first and foremost, more than I am a writer, which has impacted my production clearly. I'd rather read than write. Such loyalty to the literature ain't done good things to my writing career but it has been a humanising joy to my soul or my humanity.
How have your reading tastes and preferences evolved over the years as you navigated your life as an immigrant, a student at Rutgers and Cornell, and later as a writer and professor?
One hopes that with age, one's reading tastes broaden and deepens (and that similarly one's intellectual, emotional, and philosophical qualities also). Whether this is true or not in the latter regard, I cannot say. The work must show. But there's no question my reading has become more catholic and more intensely curious the older I've gotten. There are books and writers I would never have tolerated when I was in my 20s that I now find indispensable. George Eliot and Frank Chin, for example.
My immigrant self needed maps and codes with which to navigate the world I gained (New Jersey) and the world I lost (Dominican Republic). I needed escapes to deal with my poverty and family madness. Now I have therapy, and I am more rectified to my homelands—past and present. The old gusting holes within my heart no longer run the show as they once did. I will not say that I've transcended my earlier preoccupations—only that they have aged into something less instrumental, more profoundly existential, a richer vintage.
Any early reading life memory or influence from your childhood while growing up in the Dominican Republic, or in New Jersey that left a lasting impression on you?
I wrote an essay a little while back: about finding a classified ad in the newspaper offering free books and how my young poor self grabbed a shopping cart and went and got those free books and that's how I started my library. I have nephews who won't get off the couch or drop the phone to save their lives (exaggeration but not by much) and yet, here I was eager to push a shopping cart four miles to pick up some old paperbacks in the middle of the summer. That eagerness to be near books still drives my love of reading today and forms the initial velocity that sent my writing into the skies.
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Is there some book or literary figure from your childhood, or something you read after arriving in the US, that made a big impression on you and is close to your heart?
I went through many ages and many loves as a young reader. Richard Adams, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Lloyd Alexander, John Christopher. Given the time I came up in—the 70s and the 80s—apocalyptic writers had an enormous impact. The Wyndhams of that particular corner of the book world.
But it was John Christopher that was dearest to me in those years. I read everything he ever wrote and I'm still trying to equal the power that his Tripods and Sword of the Spirits trilogy had on me.
Were there any books or authors that profoundly influenced you during your college years at Rutgers, or at Cornell while you were trying to find your literary voice as a writer of colour in America?
Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Edward Rivera, Sandra Cisneros, Samuel R. Delany—these formed the protein chains of my literary DNA. How much they taught me. How I continue to return to their books. These are writers whose books were intensely written for a time of reading and not our age of screens. Writers whose deep deliberations meant everything to me, who understood that resistance to colonial racial oppression begins not with performance or outrage but with humble inventory of one's complicity.
College in the early 90s was a joy because this was a time when one could focus, one could read intensely, and when conversation with people was an essential way we continued our conversation with our reading. I learned so much not just from these writers and their works, but from the people around me who were reading these writers at the same time. To pour out one's reaction into another ear and heart is quite different from writing a blog post, and I, for one, was glad I had to process my reading through people.
Name some books or authors that you find yourself returning to often. What draws you back to them?
Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Natsuo Kirino, J.R.R. Tolkien, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Edwidge Danticat. These are writers whose insights and formal dimensions continue to challenge me as a reader and a writer. These are literary artists who started conversations that I cannot resist joining, but which will never finish. Why precisely? No idea. I could list for pages why these books draw me, and yet never evoke the mysterious gravity that brings and keeps one in a book.
Any book(s) that is kind of a comfort read for you: something you keep on your bedside table and read a little before going to bed?
I'm an incorrigible reader. Reading itself is the comfort.
Are there some books you frequently give away as gifts to friends or family members, that you believe everyone should read?
I always give away [books by] Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, and Haruki Murakami. They are writers that enchant both experienced and novice readers alike; they are writers with profound things to say, and they have written a number of very slender, un-intimidating novels.
Have you discovered any books or authors later in life that somewhat changed your perspective about life or writing? Say, some underrated writers or authors outside the mainstream, traditional literary canon whose books are not easily available anymore.
William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is disturbing and brilliant, and not enough folks have read it. Not enough folks read Frank Chin's work or Anjana Appachana's. All these writers are unsettling in the truest sense of the word. To discover what I mean one must read them, naturally.
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What are you currently reading? Any recent works—fiction, non-fiction, poetry—that stood out for you?
Max Hastings' history of the Korean War. Richard Cowper's The Twilight of Briareus. Elif Shafak's Black Milk. All dynamite for totally different reasons.
Recommend some books that have influenced your understanding of the immigrant experience in America, or book(s) that resonated with your sense of identity as a Dominican-American.
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Edward Rivera's Family Installments. Oscar Hijuelos' Our House in the Last World. Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban. Gish Jen's Typical American. V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival. Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!. These are some of my absolute essentials.
Imagine you are hosting a literary dinner party and you can invite only three writers—Dominican, Caribbean, or Latinx, both living or dead. Who would you choose, and why?
Gabriel García Márquez, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison. As someone of African descent I included members of the African diaspora. I think these writers would have the best time together and would produce the kind of 'good trouble' we all need.
Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.