The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Top 100 #44)

By Mark Haddon
★★★★★

Five Things I Liked About The Curious Incident:
1. Christopher
2. Hidden letters
3. Hot strawberry milkshakes
4. White noise
5. Palm-to-palm hugging

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has been for years one of those books I’m aware of but never been quite intrigued enough by to buy or read. But recently I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, perhaps the most impressive being my brother’s recommendation. He’s not known for being a big reader, and what he does read tends more toward fantasy than literary fiction. So, needless to say, when I heard he enjoyed this book my curiosity was spiked. Then I found a wonderful used copy at a book sale* in my town a couple weeks ago – perfectly worn to floppy softness without being broken or ratty – and it jumped to the top of my To Read list (now a To Read pile, thanks to that book sale!). After all, it's not often that my brother and I overlap in reading material!

Have you ever read a book with an autistic narrator/protagonist before? No? Me neither. Until now. Christopher is 15 years old (though it's easy to forget and start thinking of him as much younger), hates the colors yellow and brown, being touched, and speaking with or being surrounded by strangers, likes hot strawberry milkshakes, can calculate the powers of 2 out to 245 in his head, wanders the streets in the wee hours of the night when he can’t sleep, takes everything literally, and is relentlessly logical – though not always in a way that seems logical to us. Christopher lives alone with his father, under the impression that his mother died some time ago of a sudden heart attack. One night, Christopher discovers his neighbor’s dog – Wellington – murdered in the garden with a fork. This curious incident spurs Christopher to embark on an investigation in the style of Sherlock Holmes (his literary idol and kindred spirit, both possessing powers of observation far beyond the norm) in which he uncovers not only a canine killer, but a network of cracks in his carefully organized life that threaten to cave under pressure and overwhelm him with an inundation of reality.

The power of Haddon’s writing is entirely in the construction of Christopher’s voice. Although Christopher’s story is a somewhat sad one, Haddon doesn’t make the mistake of confusing empathy with pity. You don’t need to be autistic to identify with Christopher. His neuroses are, of course, more severe than the average person’s, but we all have irrational fears, things that make us lose our cool, things that cause us angst. (My current thing is wasps… I feel vulnerable to stealth attacks and dive-bombs whenever I venture outdoors.)

Furthermore, seeing the world through Christopher’s eyes is some of the most convincing evidence to support the suggestion that we only ever use a small percentage of our brain, because it seems that for anyone to have such powers of intellect they must be working with a more powerful mental machine than the rest of us. And speaking from personal experience, I can vouch that the portrayal of Christopher’s mental capabilities seems pretty accurate to me, not an exaggeration at all. That being said, Christopher’s intelligence is as much a handicap as it is a blessing, preventing him from viewing the world in any terms other than black and white, right and wrong, yes and no.

I love this quote from the Goodreads summary: “Herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion.” The result is a poignant, unique, and resonant novel as enjoyable for adults as teens, and for literary as non-literary readers (my brother being case in point). It's also a really quick read, so... you have no excuse.

*Calling that event a book sale is like calling The Strand a bookstore – technically true, but it doesn’t begin to cover it. Picture an ice rink. Now fill it with tables. Now strew those tables with piles of books. Now add more books stacked in boxes beneath the tables. Now put $1-3 price tags on each book. Now add a “All items half-off” sign to the door of the rink. Boggles the imagination, doesn’t it? If it hadn’t been so chilly, I’d have thought I was in heaven. 

Books Read This Year: 45

Top 100 Progress: 44/100

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Top 100 #40)

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About Adventures:

1. Sherlock’s disguises.

2. His contemplative violin playing.

3. “This is a three pipe problem, and I ask you not to speak to me for fifty minutes.”* 

4. Catching many of the allusions to the original Sherlock in Sherlock and the recent Robert Downey Jr. remake.

This is Sherlock Holmes like I expected him to be: Sassy, quirky, quick-witted, insensitive, infuriatingly secretive about his thought process, and more concerned with the thrill of the case than the fate of his clients. I accidentally skipped a book in the overall series (The Sign of Four, one of the four novels), but there was clearly a lot of growth in Doyle’s storytelling and character development, and it made the stories that much more enjoyable. If A Study in Scarlet was Sherlock in conception, then The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock fully realized, in all his snarky, brilliant glory.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a book of short stories, each detailing a single case, as told by Sherlock’s partner in (solving) crime, Dr. Watson**. The installments of the complete Sherlock Holmes series can all be read independently and still make sense, but they also build on one another, with a couple plot threads stretching across several books (and becoming more plentiful as the series go on, I gather) and occasional references to previous cases. While all the stories in Adventures are witty and entertaining, I did, of course, have a few favorites: The Red-Headed League (I covet the hair of gingers, ❤ Weasley family), The Man With the Twisted Lip (an intrigue of identity and disappearing acts), and The Adventure of the Copper Beeches (Bertha Mason isn’t the only woman in the attic***).

The more Sherlock Holmes I read, the more I want to read, because they start off good and get progressively even better. I’ve now decided to read the entire series, and I’m crossing my fingers that my friend gets the complete set for her birthday this week so I can steal borrow them when we get back to campus. 

To conclude with a non sequitur: was anyone else aware that Dr. House is supposed to be a re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes? My first thought when I was told was, “Ah… That makes perfect sense.”

* Side note: In the ingeniously adapted BBC series Sherlock (which I mentioned in my post on A Study In Scarlet, and have since finished, and ohmygosh-why-are-there-no-new-episodes-until-next-winter-the-cliffhanger-is-killing-me), Sherlock says instead, “This is a three patch problem,” and shows Watson his arm with three nicotine patches on it. Très clever, non? But that’s Sherlock.

** Another clever adaption by Sherlock (because I’m sure you’re as excited by these as I am) is playing off the form of the stories by having Watson publish a blog about Sherlock’s exploits.

*** Jane Eyre, anyone? Hoping to make a trek to a Landmark theatre here in DC on Tuesday, to see it before I head back to the Midwest, where it doesn’t come out for another week.

Books Read This Year: 23

Top 100 Progress: 40/100

A Study In Scarlet

By Arthur Conan Doyle
★★★☆☆

Three Things I Like About A Study in Scarlet:
1. Non sequiturs that emerge from Sherlock's internal logic.
2. Sherlock's manic approach to sleuthing.
3. Use of Mormon Salt Lake City as a setting for intrigue.

A couple weeks ago I came across a recommendation for a new BBC drama called Sherlock – a modern adaption of Sherlock Holmes. The series (thus far) consists of 3 90-minute episodes, based on Doyle’s novellas and short stories. I downloaded the first episode, “A Study in Pink,” based on A Study in Scarlet, and loved it.* Being a stickler about reading books before watching their movies and never having read ay Sherlock Holmes before, I decided to spend some time with the genuine article before watching the next two episodes.

A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story. It begins with the first meeting of Dr. Watson and Sherlock. Dr. Watson is fresh from Afghanistan, having retired from service following an injury and subsequent illness, and is looking for a flat mate. Within 24 hours he and Sherlock have moved into 221 Baker Street and Dr. Watson is embroiled in Sherlock’s latest case – a man found murdered with the ambiguous word “Rache” written on the wall in blood, though the body has suffered no wounds. The mystery spans from the streets of London all the way to the wilderness of the American West, as the backstory unfolds in the fledgling Mormon city of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Like I said, I’ve never had any experience with Sherlock Holmes before. This was a good introduction – being that it is the introduction – but I’ve heard that Doyle’s later stories are much better, and I do have to agree that this one had its flaws. Sherlock didn't say "elementary" even once! And the backstory to the murder is excessive and takes up almost half the novel. I cut Doyle plenty of slack, though, because this was his very first novel and he wrote it in 3 weeks. Plus, how can you really criticize the work of someone who created one of the most iconic characters of all time?**

I enjoyed this novel particularly in juxtaposition with the first episode of Sherlock, which played off A Study in Scarlet without exactly replicating it. I won’t go into details for fear of spoiling either the book or the show, but the general introductory framework of A Study in Scarlet remains intact in the episode, as does the presence of the word “Rache” and the means of murder, though the actual circumstances and motives vary vastly. So if you have the time and interest, I definitely recommend reading A Study in Scarlet (it won’t even take you long, as it’s hardly 100 pages) and then watching Sherlock. I daresay you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll be reading more Sherlock Holmes soon, partly because I’m getting a kick out of him right now, and partly because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be #40 on my BBC Top 100 list. Woot!


* Seriously, it’s awesome. Sherlock is played to perfection, and the modern setting is used surprisingly effectively. It kicks the recent Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law version’s butt. And there’s three times more of it! What are you still doing here?
** Random thought, but I wonder if people will be making television adaptions of Harry Potter in like 100 years. That is, if anyone still watches TV anymore.

Books Read This Year: 20
Top 100 Progress: 39/40

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

By Alan Bradley

★★☆☆☆

Two Things I Liked About Sweetness:

1. Flavia’s extensive morbid knowledge of poisons.

2. Flavia’s bike named Gladys.

You know those books you pick up every time you’re in a bookstore, read the back blurb, ponder, and then ultimately put back down? Sometimes, when you finally give in and buy it, you kick yourself for not having done so earlier because it so exceeds your expectations. Other times, it falls as flat as you feared it might. This book falls into the latter category for me.

It seemed promising enough: Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old mad chemist with a specialty in poisons. She lives in an old English manor house in the 1950’s with her father and her two older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and has a penchant for the dramatic. Much to her delight (“I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”), she finds a man sprawled in the garden and witnesses his last breath as the sun rises the morning after a dead bird showed up on their doorstep, a stamp mysteriously pierced on its beak. Flavia determines the two events must be connected, and she’s not going to relent until she finds out how.

It seemed promising enough, but… I don’t know. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it (except for an annoying overuse of nicknaming; case in point: Ophelia became ‘Feely’). It just didn’t excite me. It lacked that essential and difficult to define spark necessary to really kindle my interest. Flavia should have been spunky and fresh and engaging. She didn't quite succeed. The mystery should have been quirky and suspenseful and engrossing. It wasn't. The whole thing was better as an idea, as the possibility contained in the promise of a black cover blurb.

See? I can’t even get worked up enough to carry on about it in an impassioned and detailed bad review. I’m just… eh, apathetic about it.

Books Read This Year: 17

Top 100 Progress: 39/100

The Angel's Game

By Carlos Ruiz Zafón

★★★★☆

Hooray! I finally managed finish the pleasure book I’ve been reading on the sly all month, sneaking in a couple chapters here and there while the heavyweights* domineering my time for J-Term weren’t looking. I resent the fact that all those people who told me I wouldn’t have time for pleasure reading in college are kind of right. It’s not that I don’t have any time for pleasure reading – believe me, I make time – but it is true that I pretty much read as many books throughout the entirety of first semester as I did in one and a half weeks home for winter break. Le sigh.

The Angel’s Game is one of those prequel-but-not-really books. It features the father of Daniel Sempere, the protagonist of The Shadow of the Wind, and gives the backstory behind Shadow’s opening scene, when Daniel is taken to the Cemetery of Lost Books for the first time on the morning he wakes to find he can no longer remember his mother’s face. In The Angel’s Game, we’re introduced to Daniel’s mother – a feisty and idealistic author-in-training named Isabella, apprenticed to David Martín.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Angel’s Game tells the story of David Martín, who has spent the majority of his life sequestered in a foreboding old tower house in Barcelona, writing an ongoing series of mystery/crime novels entitled The City of the Damned, and eternally frustrated with himself for selling out for the sake of a paycheck. When a mysterious foreign publisher, Andreas Corelli, approaches him with a commission for 100,000 francs that would free him from his enslavement-by-contract to the publishers of his pulp fiction, David cannot refuse, despite his misgivings about the sinister nature of the commission itself – to write the doctrine of a new religion.

The further David delves into his new project and into the mysteries shrouding his elusive publisher, the stronger his apprehensions become as David’s gothic home begins relinquishing its secrets and exposing uncanny connections between David, his increasingly unnerving and otherworldly publisher, and the house’s former occupant, who died under mysterious circumstances a generation before. As David reaches the completion of his work and the unraveling of the mysteries surrounding it, he’s forced to wonder just what sort of game he’s gotten himself into, and whether it’s one he can escape with his life – or his soul – intact.

The prose is beautiful, as usual. Zafón is a master at creating lurid, surreal, and captivating worlds for his stories. But the plot itself crescendoed without the satisfying forte and decrescendo of The Shadow of the Wind. Instead of coming together smoothly like the teeth of a zipper, the plot threads were tied into a ‘this-has-gone-on-long-enough-let’s-wrap-it-up’ knot. And I'm all for leaving some things ambiguous at the end of a book - there's a kind of beauty in needing to think for yourself to make complete sense of things - but I felt too ambiguous at the end of The Angel's Game. Standing alone, it might have been a five star book. But The Shadow of the Wind set the bar so high that its own companion novel couldn’t measure up.

*You know, all those archaic, dry (but kinda sorta influential) texts I’ve been reviewing lately: Livy, Virgil, and this one guy named Cicero… 

Books Read This Year: 7

Top 100 Progress: 38/100