As the sun dawned on the new day and New Year, I was in bed. Asleep. With good intentions to be up at 8:30am, but found myself still napping through my alarm clock snooze system until 10:40am (by that time I was already late for my friend’s farewell beach walk).

Thankfully, I got ready fast enough to make up for the two hours of unplanned, but fully intentional sleep, and see my friend off on her big holiday. Once home I was able to start the two essential New Year’s day tasks:
1. Clean up after the New Year’s Party the previous night, mainly in the washing of dishes as my dogs took care of any crumbs on the floors.
2. Taking down the old calendars and putting up the new ones, which have been awaiting display since September.

With the essentials taken care of, in my mind it was high time for a reading break

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Graeme Simsion’s novel ‘The Rosie Project’ has been gaining a lot of popularity and here in Australia was named in the ‘Top 50 Books You Can’t Put Down’ for 2013. The recommendations were enough to get me interested, but detailed blurb and first page cemented my determination to read it. I am not lying to you when I say they accurately described the book as one you cannot put down, as I started reading it at 1PM and finished it seven and a half hours later. Usually when I feverously devour a book, it is due to the ease of narration or the strong hook of the plot (commonly a romantic thread), yet I was strangely attached to the principal character, Don Tillman.

Don is, to put it mildly, obsessive-compulsive and loves nothing more than to follow his carefully planned schedule that optimizes for efficient use of time and energy. He lacks social skills and has only managed to make a few friends in his life, but he has his work as a genetics professor and that is enough. Until he is told by Daphne, one of his oldest friends, that he would make a great husband for someone, which leaves Don stunned as he had resigned himself to a future without a partner. The new self-confidence results in the creation of the ‘Wife Project’, in which potential future partners have to fill out a carefully constructed questionnaire to be even considered by Don.

The construction and implementation of the project brings more laughs to the readers and frustration to Don, until Rosie enters his office. Rosie is a great character, as not only does she represent someone Don would never consider ‘future partner’ material, he is helpless drawn to her and forces his way to spending time with her. By spending time I mean hatching an elaborate project to discover who her biological father is, you guessed it, dubbing it the ‘father project’. These multiple projects cross-sectioning over Don’s life, and Rosie forcing out of his schedule and into a world he would have never dared to experience, has you frantically turning the pages. Again I was slightly driven by the potential romance between Don and Rosie, I honestly just read for Don and his experiences.

As when I began reading the novel, I read Don as a written form of Sheldon Cooper (from the Big Band Theory) as the narration and observations made by Don kept the novel in a comic frame. Yet Simsion was able to quickly humanize Don, making him not only a source of humour but of empathy. I found him immediately refreshing as a narrator, as his social faults were made immediately aware yet he managed to win me over with constant bravery, openness, and honesty.

On the surface the novel is enchantingly sweet and impressively humorous, but contains deeper truths of reality and social norms that are additionally compelling.