Wednesday, February 24, 2010

currently (re)reading...

One of my favorite books: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon.
The novel is from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, and takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day.
One of my favorite quotes:
"A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn't happen. For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot raspberry milkshake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a mug of tea I start thinking about Coco-Pops and lemonade and Porridge and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn't wearing a diving suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand up straight and hang onto the rail and I'm going to fall over and be killed. This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky and scared. And this is why everything I have written here is true. "

2 comments:

  1. That wasn't Travis. It was just logged in as Travis...oops

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  2. LOVE this book! And that part is a great piece. Happy Reading!

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