Monday 18 July 2005

Page Turners

I got a new copy of the book I forgot in St James's Park and finished it yesterday. If you have any interest in languages and in particular unusual and threatened languages, I suggest you find a copy of Spoken Here by Mark Abley. It is really well written and if you live in or come from a region where a minority language is still spoken, it might make you want to learn it. It definitely made me want to learn Breton, the language of Brittany, the region of France where I was born.

Then, this afternoon, I decided I needed something else to read so I went to the pile of unread books I have in the living room and picked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I started reading it. And then I just couldn't stop. As it is written in the first person, from the point of view of an autistic child, it immerses you in the story in a way that no other book does, apart maybe from Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I just couldn't put the book down and have just finished it. The Curious Incident... got rare reviews when it came out, which always makes me a bit cautious. But in this case, every single review of praise is deserved. If you only read one book on the beach this summer, it has to be this one, except if you've read it before.

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