I picked up reading again after I came to London. There are several reasons for this.
One is I like reading. Give me a good book and I am out of this world and into the book, and I don’t hear anything happening around me. Another reason is that I need to train, feed and grow my English vocabulary. I love to learn new words like “mindboggling” and learn expressions like “Putting the kettle on”. For obvious reasons.
A third one is that I sometimes like to sit in a/the Cafe and watch people. And listen to what they talk about, and make some notes about that in my notebook. But I still feel silly sitting in a cafe on my own, and having a book with me somehow makes that easier.
So I installed the Now Reading plugin, to clutter the already cluttered sidebar on this blog even more. And started out with buying books. I could write a long rambling story about which books I bought and why and where and for how much, but I won’t.
I am just going to write that the last book I read was called :
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
And that it is written by Mark Haddon.
And that it is one of the most amazing and original books I have read. Ever. And that I think you should read it.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour’s dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
It is a fantastic book, I agree. And did you know that last year, a book with Mark Haddon’s poetry has been released (The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea) AND that his new novel A Spot of Bother will be hitting the shops in a few months’ time? I’m really looking forward to that!
I did know about his poetry, didn’t know there was a new book on it’s way. And I haven’t read his other books either, but I might do that after this one. He is a very original writer.
Hmmm, sounds interesting. Did you by any chance see Horizon yesterday? Very interesting program about dr. Temple Grandin, the “woman who thinks like a cow”, who managed to turn her autism to her advantage, because it helps her to instinctively understand animals. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/temple.shtml. I guess now I’ll order both her autobiography and the Curious Incident.
I just read in the Metro this morning that it has been a great program. I think I can watch it through the repeat function of my digital tv, I’ll check. And the Curious incident, it is really good, so i don’t think you will regret reading it.
Already ordered both…
Still need to read the book, lays here for already a year.
The plugin is interesting, lets see if I can rewrite that so it uses bol.com instead of amazon.
Speaking of learning expressions: I still like “something for the weekend“, which I picked up watching Balderdash and Piffle.
Yes it is a nice plugin indeed. You can make your own library ( https://www.thegirlinthecafe.com/library/ haven’t activated it yet, as I am not sure if I am going to use it that seriously) and keep track of all your books.
I like the “something for the weekend” expression too, I had never heard it before :-) But things do get confusing when regular and innocent expressions like those do have deeper meanings like that!
hey
i noticed you are all interested in mark haddon and just thought i would drop by to mention to that mark has started a blog at the follwoing address for the release of A Spot of BOther and i thought you may want to check it out – it’s witty and insightful – worth a visit
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/minisites/aspotofbother/
The blog is actually here:
http://www.aspotofbother.co.uk/virtualtour
His blog is indeed wonderful.