The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time
by Mark Haddon

I first heard of this book a year or so ago, I think, and remember being interested in it then. M., A friend with similar interests, had read it and said it was good. He had a copy. So I searched it out at the library, and they have quite a few copies of it, but there were dozens of requests for it, so that if I had requested it it would have been months before it finally came to me. I might have seen it for sale at a used book store too, but it wasn't worth the eight or ten dollars or whatever it would have cost.

After I finished reading The Tin Drum, which took a long time, I didn't know what to read next because I had thought of so many things I wanted to attack next that there was a bottleneck. I wanted to read so many different things that I couldn't decide on one. So I e-mailed M. saying what should I read next, and when he and I got together for coffee a few days after that he loaned me this book and one other. So I read it and it was indeed very good. The math particularly. I'm obviously (or maybe not-so-obviously) not autistic, but I related to Christopher's math fetish. It's nice to have order. Math makes sense.

Very original, writing from the point of view of the autistic person. As a reader, you worry about him in situations where he's not worried about himself, but should be. And you learn how difficult it must be to live with an autistic person, whose priorities and needs are so incredibly different than a normal person's. Heartbreaking.

How do you pronounce Siobhan?

I read this book mostly at home on the couch, but I took it with me when I went to Iowa for Thanksgiving, so I also read it in the guest bedroom at my sister and brother-in-law's house in Cedar Rapids. Also read it in the Coliseum at the state fairgrounds while waiting for amateur hockey to start. And at my in-law's house one afternoon while I was killing a couple of hours there because my wife and her mother were having a "boutique" at my house and I needed to be away from that.

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