jumping into the middle

At a recent conference, I bought a book at the $2 table. It was Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code. After I started it, I realized it was probably not the first in the series, but I didn't know until today that it's actually the third book. I still want to read the first two, but I sort of feel like they're spoiled. Right now I'm reading the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. It was all the rage a while back and I'm just now getting to it. Even though it's fictional, I'm finding it an interesting look into what we think an austistic person's mind might be like. We norms like diseases and conditions that we can cure, but autism and a lot of other neurological disorders are simply things that make people very very different. They can learn to be a bit more like the rest of the world but that's it.