"Curious Incident" - I got stuck at page 3. Help!

Post Reply New Topic

Encouraged by good reviews, I decided to "investigate" the book "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". I have read the excerpt available on the Amazon, and a little longer one at http://mostlyfiction.com/excerpts/curiousincident.htm. This looks like a very interesting book. I really enjoyed the remark "Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away". I wonder if this can ever be proved or disproved.

The book seems to have mind-boggling riddles on every other page. The first one that I have run into is on page 3. There is a row of faces that Christopher (hero) is not able to recognize. I seem to have the same problem. Although the text suggests that the faces should have explanations written next to them, they appear to be missing in print. Can you tell what the two faces in the middle of the row mean? In my opinion the second face is top - angry, bottom - happy, together - maybe mischievous? Do you agree? The third face puzzles me completely: disgusted? confused? sad? Can you read it without a doubt? (The first and fourth I get with no problem: winking and surprised.) Boy, I thought I was good at reading facial expressions, and here I stumble on an example that was supposed to be obvious to a reader (I guess).

You can see the page at http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1400032717/ref=sib_dp_ln/103-5179898-1630261#reader-page.
Click Next Page twice to get to page 3. The pictures of faces I am talking about are on top of this page.

Last edited by magic on 21 Jul 2004, 12:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

my gran got it for me, iv tried reading it but i dunno. this style of writing is really hard for me to read. he goes into too much detail and then i loose concentration of whats happening... but thats to do with the AS so i guess he cant help it.

The style is almost exactly as I would write it, except that I would use longer, more complicated sentences. The digressions going astray into details is what I find most fascinating in this book. I guess I will buy it, if only I could find other book(s) worthy of $16.60 that I would need to get free shipping.

ah well.
"each to his own" or whatever they say lol

I've read the entire book, and it was very good. If you are able to, I suggest you look past the "riddles," they aren't there to confuse you, just to give insights into Christopher's mind. I believe the book was written by an NT who has worked extensively with autistic individuals and wanted to try to share with other NTs what autistics may experience.

I don't know exactly what all the smiley expressions mean, either, but I don't know if anyone could say (without a doubt) what each one is, unless they have seen the symbol before. After all, those smilies don't look anything like actual people's faces. Are there any NTs on this board who can answer this question?

I don't know if I have asperger's or not, but there were some things Christopher writes about that I could relate to and others that were completely foreign to me. Of course, he is HFA, and he seems to be more effected by autism than many people on this board say they are. Also, I am not a math savant like he is, in fact, I don't really like math at all, so that aspect of the book, while interesting, means little to me.

As an artist, what I liked most were the diagrams and depictions of things that are put into the text, offering more visual (and more direct) insight into how Christopher sees things. I also enjoyed the details and the tangents. The overall story is interesting as well, so I recommend continuing with it if you are interested.

Of course I understand this and I went past page 3 and read all 20 or so pages that were available online. But when my mind sees something that it perceives as a puzzle, it won't give me a break until the puzzle is solved. (On a humorous side note, my brain responds this way to Torley's avatar.)

Returning to the contents of the book, I recognize Christopher as a fellow logical mind, one that puts logic before emotions. This is actually a quality that distinguishes me from most other people, according to my analysis. I can find several parallels between Christopher's way of thinking and mine. His logical-mathematical-physical interests are similar to those that I had at his age, and still have. (Side note: the book provides incorrect explanation of the problem why night sky is dark.) Although I never learned a list of prime numbers, I had good time designing algorithms and writing programs that were generating such lists. I know a list of powers of two, but only up to 17th power (Well, most programmers awakened in the middle of the night and asked what is 2 raised to 16th power would immediately give you the right answer!)

Another similarity is that we both appear to have minds that are rule-based. Rules are sometimes very strong, but I have found that it is relatively easy to modify them and add new ones. Inevitably though, there are some rules that are of dubious quality. I can even recall a good/bad luck car-counting rule (!), although in my case it was short-lived and had little weight.

I also relate to the philosophical tint in his thoughts (such as in the remark about prime numbers and patterns, that I quoted). Yet another similarity is that I appear to stumble on the same "NT-easy" (?) problems that he does. Row of faces is one example, and another is the joke "His face was drawn, but the curtains were real." It took me half an hour to understand it, and while I appreciate its logical beauty, I find this triple-meaning word play too complex to be funny. I just can't get all three meanings together. This is somewhat shocking to me, as I am an expert in double-meaning word plays.

The biggest difference is that Christopher appears to be lacking imagination, which I have rather in excess. This enables me to have a dreamworld that serves as a buffer. I can split my conscious attention between the real world and the dream world, and this can be done on a continous scale (100% real world - memory like a camcorder, 0% - memory gap). Although I suspect that this is not the way most people sift irrelevant details, it nevertheless works for me.

[Sorry for a long digression, but I couldn't resist. If you find my analysis weird, then this only proves the fact that I have a weird mind.]


Hey, NTs reading this, can you help?


My thoughts exactly. I am anxious to read the rest of the book to see if the fellow logical mind "lives up to my expectations".

Civet, thanks for your remarks.

Last edited by magic on 23 Jul 2004, 11:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

First: wink ("just kidding"-type)
Second: sort of a twisted-angry thing, kind of like the emoticon
Third: confused?
Fourth: I have no clue.

(haha, LOL about my avatar, magic. Yeah it can be a puzzle )

By the way, does it have any hidden symbolism?
(Just trying to "solve" it. )

Would that be giving away the answer too easily?