I liked the fact that he only solved the case through his father's impatience with him. It seemed more realistic than his connecting all the dots.
Back in my journalism days, I used to get a lot of good quotes by people being irritated at how thick I was and just losing their shit with me. That took its toll, though. They'd see their quote in print and then lose their shit with me all over again. My editor liked me because she said I gave people "diarrhea of the mouth." I told her the technical term for that was "logorrhea," and she looked like she wanted to hit me.
It could be that people with autism develop something that passes for intuition as they get older, by virtue of the fact that they recognize familiar patterns in people's behavior and in the unfolding of events, and they can say, "Ah, yes, this reminds me of..."
Anyway, just started reading the book again. Not finding it quite as addictive as I did the first time, perhaps because I'm not so desperate for some kind of mirroring as I used to be. There are still some passages that still ring very true to me, though, especially all the ones where the protag imagines himself as the only person in the world.
Here's a link to the math problem that drove me crazy*:
The Monty Hall Problem.
* Actually, most of the math problems drove me crazy, which drives me crazy in and of itself, because how could I connect to someone in so many ways and then not be able to relate to them in any way whatsoever on just this one point? Plus, if I'm not good at math, it means I'm an illogical person, or something.
Swindon literally translates to Swine hill. Terrible place.
Never had the pleasure. Worse than Baltimore in the early 70s? Or Elizabeth, N.J., at any point in history?
