The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time

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.
CHRISTOPHER BOONE

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time is a prize winning book by Mark Haddon. I read this book towards the end of a reading slump and I believe it is a perfect book to get you out of a slump. I burned right through the pages and finished it in one sitting! Also, I borrowed it from my college library. The only time I put my college library to use, so pretty proud of that too!

The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night time

The Intriguing Plot!

This is the story of Christopher Boone. He is the protagonist and the narrator of the story. The story begins with the death of a dog, Wellington. He belongs to a lady in their neighbourhood, Mrs Shears. The dog is found in the middle of the lawn with a garden fork sticking out of his body. Christopher is really fond of dogs, so this death really upset him. He sets out on his journey of finding out the murderer.

He is encouraged by his friend to write a book about this, like a murder mystery novel. This is what this novel is about. But, on this journey, Christopher unravels way too many secrets that he had expected.

Christopher Boone

He is 15 years, 3 months and 2 days old. He suffers from some behavioural problems. While his behaviour is odd, it also what makes for many entertaining situations.

Some quirks in his behaviour go like :

He does not like yellow or brown coloured things, so he wouldn’t touch them or eat them.
If different foods are touching each other on the plate, he wouldn’t eat the food.

There are many such interesting quirks which I would like you find out through the course of the book.

He lives with his father. His mother is dead. He owns a pet rat, Toby. He finds humans very confusing and doesn’t understand emotions at all. His friend literally drew out a few emojis on paper to explain what they meant. He is very good at maths and science and knows prime numbers upto 7,057. Which is why, the chapter numbers in this book go prime number-wise like 2,3,5 and so on.

Closing remarks

The story is not very long, and not at all complex. The plot is very intriguing and I couldn’t wait to read what happens next. I would recommend this to everyone, but if you are yet to read “Hound of Baskervilles”, then go pick that first. The entire plot of that story has been discussed in this one 🐒