Books and movies

I've been finding it a little difficult to find things to do during the week to occupy my time. For the entire month of June and July I've gone on a book reading frenzy and have finished quite a number of books. Most recently, I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - by Mark Haddon. I didn't know what the book was about before reading it. I had flipped through it at Chapters and had noticed there were pictures and mathematical equations! MATHEMATICAL EQUATIONS!! I found this quite intriguing (because I'm a geek) and since it had been mentioned very briefly by someone I had met earlier this summer, I thought I'd give it a shot. After the first couple of chapters I didn't understand entirely what was going on. It was after reading about the author's background that I realized it was a story from the perspective of an autistic boy. DUH! I had heard about autism before but I didn't know entirely what it was all about. While reading this book, I did some research on the disorder and found it very fascinating. We have such a limited understanding of ourselves that a disorder such as autism is not something that we can begin to explain. While researching about the disorder, I read about the famous wax oil crayon artist, Richard Wawro, who created amazing detailed drawings using only wax oil crayons. I also found out about the movie Rain Man which is also about an autistic person and I wanted to rent this movie as it has some good reviews however they didn't have it at Blockbuster (POO!). Anyhow, the book is great and I would recommend it to others. I thought the author did a really good job at describing the life and thoughts of an autistic person.

Instead of renting Rain Man at Blockbuster, I ended up renting another foreign movie called A la folie... pas du tout or in English, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not. It's a story about a girl who is an erotomaniac - apparently another disorder that is rare and not widely understood. The movie shows both the delusional view of the erotomaniac and then the view of the victim (the person being stalked). It's actually quite frightening from the victim's point of view since they hardly know what is going on and that there is someone stalking them. The erotomaniac fabricates any reaction from the victim (even negative ones) as confirmation that the victim loves them. That's pretty freakish eh?

Anyway, I thought it was a neat coincidence that I had just finished reading a book about one human disorder and then had just happened to rent a movie about another rare human disorder!