The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

This book was a welcome departure from my recent Jack Higgins marathon. 
My wife recommended this book to me after reading, practically insisting that I read
it.  In order to explain why she insisted, I should tell you the both my son
and I have Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a disorder on the Autistic spectrum. 
His situation is admittedly more acute than mine, but let’s just say
that the apple didn’t fall from the tree.

The main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (TCIOFDITNT)
is a 15 year old autistic boy.  The plot of the book practically didn’t matter
to me as the empathy that I had with the main character was immense.  If I could
indulge myself to the point of anti-social nueroticism, this is how I would be. 
In fact, I would LOVE to behave this way now.  There is something so incredibly
comforting in the idea that I could ignore all of the other bio-entities in the world.

In TCIOFDITNT, the actual story evolves to let us see the fallibility of non-logical
brains and the chaos that they sew. 

My favorite line from the book is a simple comment on how the main character
likes to walk outside at 2-4 in the morning in order to pretend that everyone else
on earth has died from a rare disease that affects everyone but himself.  I can
honestly say that I have this fantasy and have had since I was a child.  Awesome.

In summary, if you want to learn a bit about the thought processes of Autistic spectrum
disorder people, I would definitely suggest this book.

BTW, no I am not a freak.