Light summer reading that is neither shallow nor pointless: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. About an autistic (at least that is what I assume he is, since all I know about the subject comes from Dustin Hoffmann’s performance in Rain Man) boy who finds his neighbor’s dog killed, and sets out to find out who did it. The journey he sets out on is one of very small and carefully planned steps – those of a person who is extremely smart in one dimension and handicapped in almost anything else. Wonderful insight in into the mind of a child with a psychiatric disorder – or, as the protagonist would say, we don’t know whether it is an insight or not, since we can’t get into other people’s minds. But it feels right, which is something he would not say.
Highly recommended.