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teeth?, books
Oct. 28th, 2006 04:16 pmThe Dillo is a drool fountain the last few days, and fussy today, and hand-gnawing and refusing the paci in favor of anything else, so I wonder if teeth are coming? None visible or feelable yet, but Casper got teeth at 4 months so it wouldn't be too odd. Except the baby on the corner who eats roast beef and is about to turn 1 has no teeth yet!
Books:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon. For book club, which I did join. I thought this was well done - gave the impression of really being written by an autistic person, while being much more engaging than a book actually written by an autistic person would really be. I imagine the author did a lot of research. I was sorry there wasn't really a detective story, though, and found the wrap-up a little unsatisfying, once the secret is revealed (not that it wasn't a totally obvious secret to the reader).
So then I sought out a book actually written by an autistic person, and read
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Grandin consults on animal welfare, especially in meatpacking plants - she is able to see what bothers animals, so has been able to make the plants more humane. (She's mentioned a lot in Fast Food Nation, working with McDonald's.) Grandin, even with a co-author, is not as engaging as Haddon's narrator! Lot of interesting stuff here - most interesting, to me, was Grandin's explanation of how she sees similarities between her autistic hyper-specificity and visual thinking and trouble with abstraction and the ways animals think.
Books:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon. For book club, which I did join. I thought this was well done - gave the impression of really being written by an autistic person, while being much more engaging than a book actually written by an autistic person would really be. I imagine the author did a lot of research. I was sorry there wasn't really a detective story, though, and found the wrap-up a little unsatisfying, once the secret is revealed (not that it wasn't a totally obvious secret to the reader).
So then I sought out a book actually written by an autistic person, and read
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Grandin consults on animal welfare, especially in meatpacking plants - she is able to see what bothers animals, so has been able to make the plants more humane. (She's mentioned a lot in Fast Food Nation, working with McDonald's.) Grandin, even with a co-author, is not as engaging as Haddon's narrator! Lot of interesting stuff here - most interesting, to me, was Grandin's explanation of how she sees similarities between her autistic hyper-specificity and visual thinking and trouble with abstraction and the ways animals think.