First Book of the Year

[flemmings]

Finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Like Titus Groan long ago, it's a book that simply erases one's identity and reality and substitutes its own for the duration of its reading. Like Titus Groan too, I'm not sure the book reality is one I want terribly much, but RL being as it's been this week I treasure the fact of not being myself for a little while at least. Like being drunk or drugged without the hangover or the side-effects.

And it certainly gets the London Tube experience absolutely spot on.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I was a bit disturbed by how much I identified with the main character. Like the bit about doing multiplication in your head when you're nervous.

I related this several days ago at the new year's eve party and everyone looked at me like I was crazy.

But it IS soothing. Like doing rows and rows of kanji (which I did, compulsively, in high school.)

[kickinpants.livejournal.com]

That is a great, great book. I totally loved it. The writer's second book (A Spot of Bother (http://www.amazon.com/Spot-Bother-Vintage-Mark-Haddon/dp/0307278867/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199373032&sr=8-1)) is also good, but I didn't like it as much as the Curious Incident. (I haven't checked out Titus Groan yet. Good?)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Yeah well, TG was (counts) 35+ years ago for me? I'm reluctant to look at it again since everything I thought was stunning when I was in my 30s turns out on reread to be underwhelming. And I didn't exactly find it stunning: more overwhelming sucky-in in a kind of nightmarish fashion.

Also I think you need a very large dose of Brit in your background for it to work. Same way Carson McCullers and Faulkner won't work for me, though IMO they both do for Southern American what TG does for England ie fantasy-gothify it to the max.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Kanji is soothing; counting to 15 over and over again (a classic meditation technique) is soothing; mental arithmetic doesn't soothe me at all, especially multiplication and division, because I lose sight of the numbers and that makes me anxious.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

See reply to N up there. I don't know if it's good or not. It's the kind of book you'll like if you like that kind of book: artificial, fantastic, grounded in a certain foreign system which it represents in a highly surreal fashion. My instinct says it's not your sort of book at all, if only because it's fundamentally heartless and there are very few likable people in it. But then, there are very few recognizable-as-people people in it either, as is the norm with English social satire.