CI Virtual Class

1.   In the first 21 pages of The Curious Incident, we are introduced to the narrator, Ms. Shears, and Wellington. The narrator is named Christopher John Francis Boone. He has some sort of mental disability, and I think he lives somewhere in the UK. Ms. Shears owns Wellington, who is her dog. The book starts off with Wellington, who has been killed with a pitchfork. Christopher finds Wellington and hugs him, but then Ms. Shears finds him and calls the police. Christopher hits the policeman because he doesn't like being touched and is sent to the police station. After waiting for a while, his dad picks him up and takes him home. On the car ride home, his dad tells him to stay out of other people's business, but Christopher has already made up his mind to figure out why the dog died and write a mystery novel about it. The novel is interested in Wellington's death, but it is more about Christopher's perspective on life. .

2.   My favorite part of the novel is when the narrator talks about his own life. For example, he talks about how he thinks that prime numbers are like life: logical but you can't figure out the rules. When he says things like that, it makes you really understand what kind of person he is, and you have to think about what he is saying to figure out what he means. I also like how attached he is to the dog. The way he says things makes sense, and it makes you think. He's so specific that, while it helps you picture the scene clearly, it also distances you from the action. It makes you see things from Christopher's perspective, not your own, as you normally do when you read a book. The narrator is very frank and honest. He records things exactly as they happened in a very matter of fact way.

3.   I don't think that the opening of The Curious Incident is like anything else we've read this year. All of the books that we've read start right in the action to get you interested, but none of them start quite as suddenly as CI does. I think A Separate Peace starts the most like CI because of the way that you are immediately thrown into the narrator's life, and you already know that something terrible has happened. There was a book that I read outside of class called Marcelo in the Real World that was a lot like this book. It was also about a boy with a mental disability, and the way he looked at the world was very similar. The writing style was the same: very specific and formal. Although the writing and the theme was similar, it didn't start as suddenly as CI.

4.   There are a lot of similarities between the way Christopher thinks and the way I do. For example, I'm very dependent on my watch, like he is. One time I lost it, and I couldn't stop freaking out until I found it again. For another thing, I like science and math, and I like things that you can figure out in your head logically.

5.   I don't think that CI would make a good movie because the part that makes it interesting is Christopher's thoughts. It's hard to show what someone is thinking in a movie unless you have a voiceover, but you would have to use the voiceover so much that it would get annoying. I suppose you could show him writing this book with flashes of what happened, but it would be hard to keep that up for the whole movie and still make it interesting.