Greetings,
I've just read
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.
I'd been meaning to read it for ages, and I finally got round to it and finished it in a day. It's one of the best books I've read in years.
The narrator, Christopher, is a 15 year old boy with Asperger's syndrome, which is one of the Autistic Spectrum Disorders. This means that the story is told in a way that is extremely unusual, and that really allows you to get inside the head of the narrator and begin to understand a bit more about his condition.
I've worked with autistic children before, so I knew a little about how they operate, but this book was a revelation. For an autistic person, some things may be endlessly fascinating; this can be something useful (such as maths, as in the case of Christopher) or it could be something useless (such as being obsessed with fire-extinguishers, as in the case of a girl I knew. She liked them because they made her feel safe.). Outside of the various interests an autistic person may have, something like socialising, or chatting with another human being will very likely be utterly baffling for them.
The story involves Christopher discovering a dead dog, stabbed with a pitchfork, on his neighbour's front lawn, and how he goes about solving this crime. However, this is really secondary to the strikingly original style of the narrative. Because Christopher likes maths, and really likes prime numbers, each chapter is given a prime number, rather than the usual 1, 2, 3... This means that the first chapter is chapter 2. The chapters move from subject to subject, and are often only vaguely related to the main plot, but they tell us more about Christopher and his fascinating world-view. One chapter, for instance, is headed "Reasons why I don't like yellow and brown". Another chapter is on the
Monty Hall Problem, and the appendix is devoted to Christopher's answers on his A-level maths paper.
It's the kind of book I won't forget in a long time, and if you've thought about reading it, I'd urge you not to wait like I did. You're in for a treat!
Peace
