The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Just finished another book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

It won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book

Writing his first novel from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day. For the autistic person, most stimuli register with equal impact, and because these little pieces of information cannot usually be processed effectively, life becomes a very confusing mess of constantly competing signals (book review)

Christopher, the book's autistic narrator, is gifted at and focused on mathematics: this is reflected by his inclusion of several famous puzzles of maths and logic. (Wikipedia)

Christopher's mathematical interests are reflected in his numbering his chapters strictly with prime numbers, ignoring composite numbers such as 4 and 6. So the first is Chapter 2, followed by 3, then 5, 7, 11, and so on. In addition, the contents in consecutive chapters alternate: Chapter 2 is about the unfolding story; Chapter 3 explores some aspects of the narrator's inner life not necessarily directly relevant to the immediate action; Chapter 5 returns to the narrative. This alternation continues throughout the book with the story often digressing into seemingly unconnected subjects such as Christopher's atheism and the Cottingley Fairies. (Wikipedia)

Mostly, the book is an easy read, almost like a child’s novel, except for all the mathematics and logical thinking, which honestly, isn’t my cup of tea. What really sparked me was how I saw the world and us, as human beings, from a totally different point of view, through Christopher’s eyes. It was rather enlightening.