The Rosie Project

I read The Rosie Project based on the recommendation by Bill Gates on his website "Gates Notes". This is a great website where avid readers could get good book recommendations from one the richest persons in the world for free (how ironic, but true). Most the book recommendations on Bill Gates' website do not disappoint. Neither did this.

If you have seen the television series "The Big Bang Theory (TBBT)", then you will easily relate with the main protagonist of this book. Don Tillman, who is about 40, has behavioral idiosyncrasies of the main character in TBBT Dr. Sheldon Cooper. Like Sheldon, Don is a professor in a university, has unusually fixed routines (boiling down to number of minutes spent on particular tasks), is very smart and does not recognize human emotions. Don is now looking to get married and he goes about this as a project. (Don calls it "The Wife Project") The project involves careful design of a questionnaire for screening of the potential female candidates with respect to their food habits, their alcohol consumption policy and their preferences for ice cream flavors (to name a few). He then comes across Rosie, who Don deems as completely unsuitable with regards to his questionnaire. Don falls in love with Rosie but he fails to recognize this emotion of love which eventually creates problems between him and Rosie.

Aside from exploring the love relationship between Don and Rosie, the author adds another important plot into the novel. Rosie's mother, before her early demise, tells Rosie that her father might not be her biological father. Rosie desperately wants to find her father and Don begins to help her with the DNA testing of the samples from the potential candidates. Don calls this as "The Father Project". As a part of the father project, Don and Rosie venture as bar tenders in a fake cocktail party for the alumni, travel to New York City and develop feelings for each other. The result of the "The Father Project" could be found by reading the book.

The author touches upon Don's inability to recognize emotions of love and social interactions otherwise also known as autism. The author, through Don, shows how autism impacts a person's social behavior and person's ability to have meaningful social and inter-personal relationships. The author also shows that by perseverance and efforts of friends and family, the autists could have meaningful social and inter-personal relationships. The other aspect on autism that the author touches upon, again through Don, is that some of the autists are brilliant people (Albert Einstein, Mozart to name a few )who could get extremely good at new tasks and professions very quickly. In the book, Don reads an entire book on making exotic cocktails for a fake bar party in about a week (to collect DNA samples to identify Rosie's father) and he becomes the star of the bar party by offering and making he most delicious cocktail drinks.

The book from start till end along rolls along with funny bits strewn with bit of seriousness. In all, it is a fun book to read over a week or two. An added advice, if you haven't seen the character of "Sheldon Cooper" on "The Big Bang Theory", please watch a couple of episodes before reading the book. You will be able to relate to the protagonist in real sense and even put the face of Jim Parsons whenever you read about his funny idiosyncrasies and habits.