World Book Day – Blue Badge Style Recommends

Our first recommendation is The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time – an fantastic book which also helps people to understand Asperger’s syndrome and, to some extent, learning disabilities more generally. We learn all about Christopher John Francis Boone, a fifteen year old boy with high-functioning autism, as he sets out to uncover the cause of the death of  a local poodle. It’s a story for everyone and was the first book that, outside of an already successful series, was published with different covers for adults and children.

Haddon has said that the book isn’t about a specific disorder and that he intentionally never directly mentioned Asperger’s, but rather “it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.” Something that anybody, particularly anybody with disability, can relate to.

Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings received the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in June of 2012 – a year before it was even published in the US and almost two before its UK release. This eye-opening book tells the stories of the lives of the fictional residents of ILLC – an institution for juveniles with disabilities – from their own points of view and is available to buy from March 27th 2014.

Nussbaum has been praised her unflinching and powerful ability to create beautifully real and honest characters. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different resident at ILLC in order to weave together a story about courage, humour and friendship. It comes highly critically acclaimed as a story which manages to both entertain and allow people an insight into a world which they may not previously understand.

Not just a camp Baz Lurhmann movie, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the perfect short novel and a contender for the title of the “Great American Novel”. It features incredible and exciting parties, bursting full of fashion and decadence – the classic image of the Jazz Age – but there is something brittle and hollow within the excess. It’s not disability related but it’s one of the all time great reads, full of both style and substance.

Grace Williams Says It Loud is the story of a young disabled woman ‘put away’ in a mental institution. Written by Emma Henderson, the book is told through the eyes of Grace – a character unresponsive and uncommunicative to almost all others in her story, but through portraying her thoughts on the page, we can see she is inwardly as eloquent and insightful as any of her able bodied acquaintances. Henderson takes us through the story of Grace’s life and her love affair with epileptic double amputee Daniel. A refreshing story about love and disability and a marvelous way to try and get into the head of a warm and interesting less able protagonist.

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly is Jean-Dominque Bauby’s memoir of his life with locked-in syndrome. In 1995 Bauby suffered a stroke, leading to coma. Twenty days later he regained consciousness but remained almost entirely unable to move, a prisoner in his own body. The book was written by Bauby blinking his left eye about 200,000 times over a four month period. This story of the everyday life of someone under extraordinary circumstances makes for a poignant and life affirming book.

Never Let Me Go is set in a dystopian future where clones are bred for organ transplant parts. Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro penned this instant classic which has been described as science-fiction, horror and a coming of age tale. It’s a disturbing but remarkably original story which TIME Magazine rated as the best novel of 2005 and is one of the best this century.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is and equally hilarious and shocking, taboo busting autobiography of late cartoonist John Callahan, who was both a quadriplegic and a recovering alcoholic. His cartoons about disability, politics and race were, more often than not, provocative, controversial and had a sense of humour darker than a black hole.

When accused of political incorrectness Callahan said: “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands. Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.” A fascinating character who was perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but he lived an extremely unconventional life and if you’re interested this is worth tracking down.

Take an exciting look into the wonderful world of fashion in The Devil Wears Prada… Oh no, hang on, this is actually not so much about the glamour of working in fashion, but about the grueling life of a recent graduate, working for a lifestyle magazine, who is forced to carry out demeaning tasks for her tyrannical, though stylish, editor in chief.

Actually, that all sounds traumatically familiar. There’s a story going round BBS Towers that one of our contributors ran out of their living room screaming when the movie was on telly a few weeks ago. But for outsiders it’s good fun in a holiday read kind of a way.