the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
by Mark Haddon
Normally I don't read a lot of fiction. I picked up this book for a couple of reasons. One reason was because I needed to take something light on vacation. The real reasons were twofold though; It was on sale and it had math problems in it. Or should I say, more appropriate, it has maths in it. At least that's apparently the way it's pronounced in England.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a story about an autistic child named Christopher who is very good at maths. As the narrator of the book Christopher has numbered the chapters with the prime numbers instead of the normal 1, 2, 3, etc. The crux of the story is this: Christopher finds his neighbor's poodle murdered with a garden fork in her back yard and proceeds to investigate as to who might have killed it. In the process he finds out more than he bargained for about himself and more to the point his parents. The actual mystery is revealed midway through the story and the rest of the book explores how Christopher deals with it in a way that only an autistic could.
This book has been a national bestseller and is a winner of the whitbread book of the year award which is probably why I was able to read the entire book on a couple of plane rides. It is a very enjoyable book, but at the same time I thought it was full of a lot of fluff too. Several chapters seemed to me to be fill in extraneous info. They certainly didn't seem crucial to me. In short stories you can't get away with this. In novels you can, but not a lot. I thought that this book stretched that boundary. I did enjoy the maths, especially the Monty Hall puzzle. All in all I'd still have to recommend the book as a very enjoyable read.
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