I said I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that is why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn't have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.
I said that when Father always got up in the morning he always put his trousers on before he put his socks on and it wasn't logical but he always did it anyway, because he liked things in a nice order, too. Also when he went upstairs he went two at a time, always starting with his right foot.
Mr. Jeavon's said that I was a very clever boy. I said I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn't clever. That was just being observant. Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. Like the universe expanding, or who commited a murder. Or if you see someone's name and give each letter a value from 1-26 (a=1, b=2 etc.) and you add the number up in your head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ (151), or Scooby-Doo(113), or Sherlock Holmes (163), or Doctor Watson (167). (24-25)
I love this excerpt because its very odd and it makes you think. After I read this I calculated my name Kaleigh Coleman (114). I also thought about if the weather ever affected my mood, and as far as I could tell it does not. But this passage shows how brilliant Chris is, and how sometimes he doubts himself.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage Books 2003