The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

by Mark Haddon

Amazon.com kept recommending this book to me. And I finally broke down and got it from the library. Read it on a plane home to Mom, and finished it before the plane touched down in my hot, humid hometown. Good book. Written from the perspective of a hyper-intelligent, autistic 10 year old boy. One of those books where you just want to give the main character a hug (though in this case, hugs aren't his thing). So now I've read the book, I like the book (It's sweet and funny and sad.), and Amazon.com can get off of my back.

"And I don't know why Mr. Shears left Mrs. Shears because nobody told me. But when you get married it because you want to live together and have children, and if you get married in a church you have to promise that you will stay together until death do us part. Ad if you don't want to live together you ahve to get divorced and this is because one of you has done sex with somebody else or because you are having arguments and you hate each other and you don't want to live in the same house anymore and have children. And Mr. Shears didn't want to live in the same house as Mrs. Shears anymore so he probably hated her and he might have come back and killed her dog to make her sad."

"This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father's.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

And that is why there are no jokes in this book."

Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

This book is great. It's the story of one man's obsession with candy (non-fiction, I believe). He's got a great writing style and it was a fun read, as it made me laugh out loud a whole lot (made the people on the bus a little nervous, though). I got this book from the library, but I think I'm going to have to go purchase a copy. It's that much fun. He talks about how the obsession with candy began, how national chains have taken over the business, and then goes on a quest to visit regional candy makers (and, of course, collect free samples). It's really the tone that makes the book work - a mix of true passion, dedication and self-deprication. He's trying to unleash the candyfreak in all of us.

"I doubt Saborin envisioned, back when he was getting his degree in mechanical engineering, that he would someday explain the technical intricacies of his job by biting into a malted milk egg. But he seemed perfectly happy asked me if I wanted to go downstairs and see the chocolate bunnies.

These were, in point of fact, marshmallow bunnies covered in chocolate. They rode the conveyor belt three astride, looking nonchalant in profile, as a curtain of milk chocolate washed down onto their white fleshy pelts and enveloped them and seeped off to reveal the dimensions of their bodies in a lustrous brown. Saborin was saying something or other, involving, I think, starch. I was watching the bunnies.

Simply: I could not stop watching the bunnies, the way the light struck the wet chocolate from above, the creamy falling away of the excess into a darkened pool below, the steel machinery flecked and streaked in brown. The workers overseeing the production line didn't seem to know what to do. I myself didn't know waht to do. I was obviously experiencing some kind of dramatic psychic event, one that bordered on the disassociative. I had fallen into what I would later come to recognize as a freaktrance, a state of involuntary rapture induced by watching candy production at close range. "

"I feel compelled to note the reaction of my friend Eve when I brought her a Goo Goo from Nashville: She launched into a story about how her father used to order Terry's chocolates from a sweets shop in his native Ireland. He kept these in his bedroom and dispersed them only reluctantly to his three children. Eve's mother later confirmed this account and added that she, herself, was kept on a strict candy ration. She even remembered finding a moldy box of Terry's on top of the armoire, where her husband had hidden them years earlier. Curiously, Eve is married to Evan, the Pop Rocks black marketeer who uses his spit to bore the center from Whoppers. They have two radioactively cute children, Milo and Theodora, both of whom were huge fans of the Goo Goo (or at least very much enjoyed rubing the melted chocolate on their cheeks) and both of whom will, I suspect, require years of therapy down the line."

Deception Point

by Dan Brown

Okay, so I've been lax. August was a busy month, what with C. leaving town, me visiting home, and starting/shuffling classes. That, and I haven't really been reading crazy good books that I just HAD to write about. I've been busy reading things that I know I'll have no time to get sucked into once school starts. And thus, Dan Brown is on the list.

The book is formulaic. But I still like the formula. And as someone who thinks about science, politics and funding, it was interesting. But it doesn't contain the thrills and chills of the previous ones. If we're judging just by page-turner-ness, it's great. If we're judging by how it compares to books in the genre by other writers, it's great. It's only when we compare it to other books by Dan Brown that it starts to get a little tired.