My curious incident reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time during the crack of midnight last night was wonderfully a curious incident.XP The first-person narrator, the autistic young lad Christopher Boone, reminds me of myself when I was eleven, introversive, speculative, wrapped in my own little bubble of math, science, and pastel art, withdrawing myself from people—seemingly autistic in a way that pervades sporadically until today. ANGEL, I adore you for lending me this book. In return I shall scour all your favorite John Grisham and Christopher Pike novels among secondhand bookstores in UP—hand them to you after I suck all the contents first.XD
As I was saying. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident is a whodonnit novel about an autistic detective who unravels the mystery behind the murderer of their neighbor’s black poodle Wellington, who was speared with a garden pitchfork by the lawn. It is a quick read, my magnetic eyes running through it as if it was my own story. It is divided into chapters headed by prime numbers, and the chapters alternate between the plot and the protagonist’s empirical speculations about his world of probability and numbers. One thing that separates this atheistic savant from all other characters in fiction is his literal view of the world, including believing only in all things palpable, provable, and scientific. In one page he says after questioning Reverend Peter about God and the afterlife,
What actually happens wen you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
Familiar?XD Christopher Boone is the quintessential character of my forgotten childhood repressed under layers upon layers of useless memories. We both love patterns, chess, puzzles, science fiction, and the cosmos. It’s now one of my favorite fiction novels next to Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.:D Which reminds me: I HAVE COMPLETED MY CHUCK PALAHNIUK COLLECTION!XXDDD
Includes:
- Fight Club (1996)
- Invisible Monsters (1999)
- Survivor (1999)
- Choke (2001)
- Lullaby (2002)
- Diary (2003)
- Stranger Than Fiction (2004)
- Haunted (2005)
- Rant (2007)
- Snuff (2008)
I have arduously collected them all ransacking every branch of National Bookstore, Powerbooks, Fullybooked, and secondhand bookstores alike, and I have but one book left to hunt, Fugitives and Refugees, which I doubt even exists in any dusty corner of this country.
Anyhorse. Finally bought the 5×5×5 Rubik’s Cube also known as the Professor’s Cube. It has 8 corners, 36 edges of two types, and 54 center cubelets with 48 movable of two types, and 6 fixed. Of all cubes you’d have to master the basic 3×3×3 first and everything else from 4×4×4 to 24×24×24 is effortlessly decipherable. Apparently I’m working with higher permutations even if they’re all basically solved the same way so I can display them in the house and point them to every relative and visitor and brag in passing, “Preoccupies me while defecating in the bathroom.”
