Thursday Blog: Week SIx

This week I have continued reading the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. This book is about a boy named Christopher, who discovers the dead body of the neighbor's dog. Mrs. Shears calls the police, and Christopher becomes a suspect. When a policeman touches him, he punches the policeman and gets arrested, later he gets released with a warning. After he is released he becomes obsessed with the crime and is determined to figure out who killed the dog. Christopher decides to write a book about everything that is going on. His dad later finds the book and hides it from him. Christopher while searching for the book finds letters from his mother which were dated after she apparently died. He then learns that his mother is not dead, she had an affair with Mr. Shears and his dad kicked her out. This shocks Christopher and angers him deeply, but he also does not understand everything going on. Christopher decides to ignore his father, and as a result his father starts saying everything he has every lied to him about, one thing being the death of Wellington, his dad actually killed him because of the affair. Christopher follows his mom to London to escape his dad when he finds out that his mother lives with Mr. Shears. Christopher and his mother are forced to return home and that is when his dad buys him a dog to win back his trust.

Source: www.amazon.com

As I finished this book I decided I would talk about the format of the book and the layout. The book was written as if it was Christopher, so it has a very quirky layout. For example all of the chapter numbers are prime. he says that he prefers this because he loves math and his favorite numbers are prime numbers. This choice adds a personal aspect to the book and shows how this book is almost written in Christopher's point of view. To explain his choice of prime numbers he said, "Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them." (Haddon 12)

                                                                                                                   Another thing about this book which makes it more personal to Christopher's life is the use of drawings and diagrams. Throughout the book the author adds pictures of the things Christopher is seeing and experiencing to make it feel as if you are there with him. In addition to adding to the ability for the reader to connect to the book, it also shows some of the ways in which he thinks differently than other people.  Christopher has a different brain than other people, he has a nearly photogenic memory and can do complex things all in his head such as advanced math or even creating maps. To show some of his skills the book includes illustrations of some of the things he does in hid mind and some of the things he sketches.  Below is an example of one of the maps he made while visiting the zoo. He did not complete this while he was there rather off his memory afterwards.

Source: www.slideshare.net