Literally Geeky discussion

You know the drill.

This is the spot for any and all book discussion that just can't wait until the hangout.

I've read this book before, but it's been a while and I honestly don't recall that much about it - which may or may not be a bad sign...

I've also read this book before, and I'm looking forward to the discussion - it should be an interesting one. As I said in the hangout, it's very simply written but has such a unique narrator, hopefully we'll have lots to talk about.

I'd definitely recommend the play if anyone gets a chance to see it!

It's been a really long time since I read the book but I remember being impressed by the narrator's voice.

I can say that the portuguese version of this book has the swear words censored. Or better yet, toned down, by a lot.

Ok, so here's my somewhat pretentious review:

Like most people, this is the second time I've read this book. And I clearly remember thinking during that first reading that it was somewhat disappointing that the scope of this book was so small, in that despite the journey Christopher going on seeming so large from his point of view, he was still living a fairly shitty life in Swindon by the end, his parent's relationship was depressingly over, and nothing much was ever really going to change for him. But in reading it again, I was struck by how this "smallness" really did underline the powerful truth revealed by Christopher's Asperger Syndrome influenced narrative voice - it is in the boring and mundane details of everyday life that we can see the incredible power of what Harvey Sacks called the "inference making machine". Rather than describing a mechanistic linguistic process, Sacks was talking about how it is that a human gets built who will produce their activities such that they're graspable by other people, something that each and every one of us has to do all the time in order to create the reality around us. Yes, for Christopher this ability is "broken", but really we could all do with breaking the chains of inferences that describe and, to a very large extent control, our everyday lives once in a while, and ask questions of what our world actually means. Re-reading this book threw this fact into sharp relief for me (although I, like you, have secretly known it all our lives), and I'm glad I got the opportunity to do so.

And here are two Literally Geeky focused observations/questions:
1. The book provides a pretty accurate description of ordinary life for a lot of people somewhere towards the middle/lower spectrum of British society, which as I say in my review was a bit of a problem for me in my first reading (eliciting a low-level "meh" in me due to its reflection of my own life experience), but for non-Brits, does it read as something more exotic and interesting?
2. Whilst the fact that Christopher is 15 years old could make this seem a good candidate for being a YA novel (ghastly term), the fact that the people in it are realistically sweary seems to mitigate against it as being something aimed at children. That being the case, the only reason for the book being banned that I can see is the swearing, which in turn raises two subsidiary points for me:
a) at what point was it agreed that the age of a book's protagonist automatically indicated the audience it was aimed at, and b) do people really get so offended by "bad words"? If you remove the logical fallacy of point a), then all that is left to say is Jesus Fucking Christ, get a bloody life and try and find something properly terrible to get upset by...

Red wrote: "Ok, so here's my somewhat pretentious review:

Like most people, this is the second time I've read this book. And I clearly remember thinking during that first reading that it was somewhat disappoi..."

I know when this book was published it came with two covers - one design aimed at adults and one for children. I imagine the publishers were snapping on their swimming costumes and preparing to dive into gold like Scrooge McDuck.

It's certainly a book anyone can read - and any kid who picks it up going to learn a lot. So what if there's a few swear words?