Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

I can see why it won Whitbread Book of the Year but I don't think it should have. It was a clever insight into the mind of a teenage boy with Asperger's but I found it irritating and the writing wasn't brilliant even if it was from this lad's point of view.

It seems like a work of brilliance: write in such a simplistic manner to empathise with the Asperger's. But what if - just possibly - that just happens to be the way Haddon writes? Have we all been duped? Read his latest novel and decide for yourself.

on the side of a bit boring i thought.

Has anyone got a bad word to say about this book? I haven't! Superb!

Had to actually ration this book by chapter while overseas so I didn't finish it in a night. Certain scenes, you forget about the Asperger's Syndrome and just empathise with Christopher as a confused and distressed kid realising some important home truths but finding them hard to accept.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Since I don't know a lot about autism, I wasn't looking for anything except a good read. It definitely delivered just that. For me, a math teacher, the math problems were a bonus, but they obviously meant nothing to a lot of people.

I enjoyed it, although I don't think it gave me much deeper insight into an Aspergers mind than I already gathered from undergrad psych texts. It was a good story.

I have an autstic son. There is nothing in this book I recognise. The emotionless maths-addict is as big a cliche as Rainman, in fact it is worse.

It's a good book though, isn't it?

Great book, sharp prose, well constructed plot and a really wonderful final sentence.

I really liked this. I thought it was a good attempt at producing a autism-eye view of the world.

I also really liked the fact that it's a thwarted detective story. In the world of fiction, there's a twist, a logical conclusion, a thrilling climax. In the real world, things just splutter to a halt, and the person most likley to have done something turns out to be the one who did it.

Also, I like the fact that the protagonist's understanding of the emotions of his family is flawed and flat. That seems to be correct, from my experience of autistic people.

Also, thinking about it, the book is about patterns. The narrator is enamoured with patterns, and detective stories are patterns too. He is constantly disturbed by the real world not conforming to patterns as he would like.

A top read, I think, and one that does require a bit of understanding of autism to get the most from it.

Cheers,

Mark

There's been a great debate about this book on ABCtales. Personally I loved the first two thirds but felt it lost its way at the end. I think that Haddon really gets into the mind of the kid with Aspergers - and as one of my erstwhile employees used

I felt the same as yourself. It was a fun read at the start but the more I read the more bored I became.

I thought it got a bit rushed towards the end. It was hard to believe that the main character would find some things so challenging and others entirely possible

I thought it was a bit obvious, although i didn't find it depressing ... i don't think

Still can't decide if it was clever or a bit obvious. Really quite depressing though!

I really couldn't get into this book. I found it quite boring and didn't seem to go very far. Gave up on it in the end!