That's because any intelligent person who does take the advice of Mayor Rocky Anderson's new community book club and reads Mark Haddon's internationally best-selling novel will soon be disabused of the palpably false description of the book as some kind of litany of dirty words and blasphemous talk.

Offense will more properly be taken against the small-minded critics who smear the novel's protagonist as a mere chronicler of filthy talk. Anybody who gets to know Christopher John Francis Boone will quickly find that their heart goes out to the 15-year-old mathematical genius with, as he himself puts it, “Behavioral Problems.”

It's not that the novel, praised by both literary lights and those who know about and/or suffer from the form of autism called Asperger's syndrome, doesn't have some harsh language in it. It does. Given the number of harsh events and deeply wounded people in the story, anything else would ring hollow.

In behavior that mimics Christopher's autism but lacks its charm, somebody somewhere even took the time to count the number of times the f-word appears, along with a ticking off of the s-word and various other indelicate expressions. But to dismiss this fascinating and deeply humane novel as merely a dirty book is quite simply wrong.

Christopher never swears. He also never lies. Not, he quickly notes, because he is a good person, but because he is a somewhat limited one. He doesn't use the kinder flowery language of gentler novels, either, though he likes a good murder mystery because he can understand it as a mathematical puzzle.

But Christopher does remember everything he's ever read, seen or heard - PIN numbers, addresses and, in unblinking detail, the language used by the pained people in his life. Christopher, who cannot lie, will not hide the truth from us.

The point of a novel is to help us see the world through someone else's eyes. In that, The Curious Incident succeeds masterfully. The point of a book club is to get people to read and talk about books. In that, Anderson's club has succeeded so well that even City Councilman Eric Jergensen, who Monday launched an attack on the book's selection without having read it, now says he has done so.

Jergensen's call for the mayor to rescind his choice was itself rescinded Tuesday. The councilman belatedly grasped the concept of the ongoing book club as the selection of a variety of titles over time, some of which might suit the tastes of those who do not care to read the first one.

But read the first one.