Friday, 25 July 2008 04:21 pm
Book Review: Born on a Blue Day
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deckardcanineMy mom highly recommended this book to me for personal reasons. Author Daniel Tammet, not much older than me, has both Asperger's and, as you might have guessed from the title, synesthesia. Also like me, he takes a strong interest in language, numbers, and trivia such as the dates of U.S. presidential administrations. He furthermore became a devout Christian after reading G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (and noting, as I hadn't, that Chesterton was probably on the autistic spectrum as well), tho that doesn't get mentioned until the last few pages.
The book receives no shortage of praise. Superlatives, even. The front cover blurb puts Tammet's mind ahead of Stephen Hawking's in terms of intrigue.
Now that I've read it... well, I'm not sure what I was expecting. You know how autists tend to be absorbed in their own little worlds? Yeah, this is more self-centered than the usual autobiography. And perhaps more prosy. Minor details keep popping up, not so much to enrich the scenes as to demonstrate the workings of his differently focused mind. The book could hardly be otherwise, really, but the result is that I got pretty tired of it, even as he grew to adjust better to the world around him. Probably the best parts to me are when he sheds light on subjects broader than himself.
Tammet is a savant, having gained fame for partaking in a documentary, memorizing a record number of pi digits, and learning Icelandic in a week. All amazing, to be sure, but there's only so far it can carry my interest in a narrative.
And savantness aside, nothing about his thinking or behavior is really alien to me. Maybe that's why I don't share the opinion of the cited critics: too much familiarity. Ironic when you consider that a staple of Asperger's is a rage for the familiar.
ADDENDUM: The book needs a new grammatical proofreader. Even a British editor should agree that many of those sentences badly need commas and some need periods, colons, or semicolons in place of commas.
The book receives no shortage of praise. Superlatives, even. The front cover blurb puts Tammet's mind ahead of Stephen Hawking's in terms of intrigue.
Now that I've read it... well, I'm not sure what I was expecting. You know how autists tend to be absorbed in their own little worlds? Yeah, this is more self-centered than the usual autobiography. And perhaps more prosy. Minor details keep popping up, not so much to enrich the scenes as to demonstrate the workings of his differently focused mind. The book could hardly be otherwise, really, but the result is that I got pretty tired of it, even as he grew to adjust better to the world around him. Probably the best parts to me are when he sheds light on subjects broader than himself.
Tammet is a savant, having gained fame for partaking in a documentary, memorizing a record number of pi digits, and learning Icelandic in a week. All amazing, to be sure, but there's only so far it can carry my interest in a narrative.
And savantness aside, nothing about his thinking or behavior is really alien to me. Maybe that's why I don't share the opinion of the cited critics: too much familiarity. Ironic when you consider that a staple of Asperger's is a rage for the familiar.
ADDENDUM: The book needs a new grammatical proofreader. Even a British editor should agree that many of those sentences badly need commas and some need periods, colons, or semicolons in place of commas.