I am about two thirds of the way through Mark Haddon's
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It's my mother's copy, which is a first edition.
There are very light, random penmarks on some pages, as though she'd held the book open with a couple of fingers while doing something else, not realizing that that same hand had a pen in it.
I can't believe my mother would treat a book, let alone a first edition, like that.
The book is exceptionally good, which opinion I would have posted earlier into the book, except I couldn't find a passage which would illustrate the rhythm and flow of the prose. In case you have not read one of the many blurbs or reviews praising the book, I should let you know it is supposed to be in the voice of a 15-year old autistic boy.
And I realize that I told a lie in Chapter 13 because I said "I cannot tell jokes," because I do know 3 jokes that I can tell and I understand and one of them is about a cow, and Siobhan said I didn't have to go back and change what I wrote in Chapter 13 because it doesn't matter because it is not a lie, just a clarification.
And this is the joke.
There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don't know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train).
And the economist says, "Look, the cows in Scotland are brown."
And the logician says, "No. There are cows in Scotland of which one at least is brown."
And the mathematician says, "No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown."
And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.
I'm not entirely sure you can get the gist of the book from this. Yes, there are some severe run-on sentences and a desperate need for commas and fewer "and"s, but that's the point. That's the voice of this boy, Christopher. It's an increadibly fast read for all of the slightly off English (which is slightly off English English, not American English, or, as my nephew P-- calls it, "American"). (Besides which, if you can tolerate reading my blog, you shouldn't have any trouble whatsoever with Christopher's manner of writing.)
If you read newspapers and magazines, like I do, you've probably heard of this book already. You've read praise and of random gatherings turning into book clubs to discuss The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time because that group of friends or coworkers or hockey fans discovered they were all reading the book at once. This also happened with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay some years back. It'll be happening more now that The Curious Incident... is out in trade paperback.
This is the reason why cities don't need to determine what book everyone should be reading that month, as everyone will read the same book, eventually, anyway. If it's a good book, like Kavalier & Clay or Curious Incident, that's a good thing. If it's a bad book, like anything by Nicholas Sparks or Dan Brown, well, lament Western Civilization, then read a good book and hope to start the next book trend.
At any rate, test-drive it at a local B&N or Borders, where they let you read the books without bothering you too much. I'd recommend you then buy it from an independent bookseller, but I know my friends are poor/broke/cheap, so that probably won't be happening.
And, yes, Halifax, there is always the library, if there's a copy available. They let you read the books there without purchasing, too. But you can be pretty close to sure the book from the independent bookseller won't have been taken to the john for a long read, which you can't quite say of the library or the B&N books. Remember: the colour brown is bad because it is the colour of poo.
