Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Author: Mark Haddon
Genre: Modern Fiction
Pages: 226
Rating (out of 5 stars): *** 1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Christopher Boone, a high functioning autistic, knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. The Curious Incident is written from his perspective, and details some traumatic events in his family, giving his perspective and understanding of what is happening.
Thoughts: This is another book that a co-worker sort of pushed on me, but I ended up really enjoying it much more than I expected to. For me, there were two reasons why this book was worth the read: 1) Haddon does an incredible job of writing with an autistic's voice. He is a creative writing professor, and it really shows. The book is interspersed with random facts that only an autistic person would know, along with diagrams of how Christopher works out all of the problems that he faces. I loved that aspect of the book. 2) Autistic people have a hard time understanding and feeling emotion, and so the issues that the book deals with are run through Christopher's autistic filter, putting a really different spin on the main conflicts that book discusses. It almost made the traumatic parts more poignant because they were completely devoid of any feelings. Overall, if you are looking for some good fiction that came out in the past five years, this book would be a good choice.
Disclaimer: The Curious Incident is set in England, where the F-word isn't as strong of a word as it is over here in the States. So that gets in there a fair amount, unfortunately. There are other swear words as well in some of the dialogue. Besides that, this book is clean.
Author: Mark Haddon
Genre: Modern Fiction
Pages: 226
Rating (out of 5 stars): *** 1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Christopher Boone, a high functioning autistic, knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. The Curious Incident is written from his perspective, and details some traumatic events in his family, giving his perspective and understanding of what is happening.
Thoughts: This is another book that a co-worker sort of pushed on me, but I ended up really enjoying it much more than I expected to. For me, there were two reasons why this book was worth the read: 1) Haddon does an incredible job of writing with an autistic's voice. He is a creative writing professor, and it really shows. The book is interspersed with random facts that only an autistic person would know, along with diagrams of how Christopher works out all of the problems that he faces. I loved that aspect of the book. 2) Autistic people have a hard time understanding and feeling emotion, and so the issues that the book deals with are run through Christopher's autistic filter, putting a really different spin on the main conflicts that book discusses. It almost made the traumatic parts more poignant because they were completely devoid of any feelings. Overall, if you are looking for some good fiction that came out in the past five years, this book would be a good choice.
Disclaimer: The Curious Incident is set in England, where the F-word isn't as strong of a word as it is over here in the States. So that gets in there a fair amount, unfortunately. There are other swear words as well in some of the dialogue. Besides that, this book is clean.
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