The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon | Full of Surprises! An Unexpected & Intelligent read!

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The Curious Incide...

	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon Vintage, 2004 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 1435 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher?s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I read this because a Scottish lady recommended "A Spot of Bother" on a flight from Scotland. It is great. A very unique perspectiv that has helped me to have more empathetic insight and "feel" for the world of autism/aspergers. I offered to my daughter,a 4th grade teacher, because she has had students with similar conditions has her own unique teaching experiences to compare with this.

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Full of Surprises! An Unexpected & Intelligent read!

Full of Surprises! This book is set in the UK and the "F-word" is used a lot. This was a very intelligent, unexpected read that really makes you use your head! Here are some of my favorite passages that I'd like to share from the Curious Incident which will give you a taste of what the book is like without giving away the storyline (page numbers may be different from your edition, but at least they'll serve as a general guide to find the parts I'm referring to):

Pg.13 "...Grandma Burton was in a home because she had senile dementia and thought that I was someone on television." I like this because of my last name :-)

Pg.32 When Christopher asked the reverend where heaven was he was told : "It's not in our universe. It's another kind of place altogether". Christopher reasoned that what the reverend said could not be true unless heaven was on the other side of a black hole. "...If heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice."

Pg.199 "People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But if they thought logically, they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist. And there are billions of planets where there is no life, but there is no one on those planets with brains to notice."

Pg.201 "Then she made me some Red Zinger herbal tea with sugar in it, but I didn't like it." (Red Zinger is made by Celestial Seasonings in my hometown of Boulder Colorado)

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What a great read

This was an absolutely wonderful journey with an inspired and inspiring hero. This is simply a must read.

Bigger than just a story about autism

The Boston Globe called this book, "gloriously eccentric..." which is an inaccurate way to represent this story by Mark Haddon. If anything, Haddon enters the world of autism and demystifies it, making it less eccentric. We see the world through the eyes of fifteen year-old Christopher Boone, who abhors the color yellow, but calms himself by solving complicated math problems in his head. The reader learns to re-calibrate his or her own emotional responses a la Christopher, for whom things hurt according to their logical content or lack thereof.

This book has many strengths, and Christopher's father is perhaps one of the best examples of a sympathetic but highly flawed character. While Christopher is undoubtedly the book's protagonist, the non-autistic reader will more likely empathize with Christopher's father, who is capable of both great love and great destruction.

Aside from Christopher's discussions with his therapist Siobhan, the book wisely veers away from preachy explanations about autism. Even the therapy sessions are more about interpersonal connection than outlining the intricacies of autism, and it is this that helps the reader to connect to Christopher in something other than sympathy. We engage with Christopher's world, not the world of autism...and this is right as autism spectrum disorders defy generalizations or easy categories.

The end result, if anything, is that the eccentricity of general humanity is exposed. We become conscious of our everyday lack of logic. The novel is just as much about the human condition as the autistic condition.

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