The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon

131.  These are some of the reasons why I hate yellow and brown:

YELLOW

1. Custard
2. Bananas (bananas also turn brown)
3. Double Yellow Lines
4. Yellow Fever (which is a disease from tropical America and West Africa which causes a high fever, acute nephritis, jaundice and hemorrhages, and it is caused by a virus transmitted by the bite of a mosquito called Aedes aegypti,  which used to be called Stegomyia fasciata;  and nephritis is inflammation of the kidneys)
5. Yellow Flowers (because I get hay fever from flower pollen, which is one of 3 sorts of hay fever, and the others are from grass pollen and fungus pollen, and it makes me feel ill)
6. Sweet Corn (because it comes out in your poo and you don’t digest it so you are not really meant to eat it, like grass or leaves)

BROWN

1. Dirt
2. Gravy
3. Poo
4. Wood (because people used to make machines and vehicles out of wood, but they don’t anymore because wood breaks and goes rotten and has worms in it sometimes, and now people make machines and vehicles out of metal and plastic, which are much better and more modern)
5. Melissa Brown (who is a girl at school, who is not actually brown like Anil or Mohammed, it’s just her name, but she tore my big astronaut painting into two pieces and I threw it away even after Mrs. Peters cellotaped it together again because it looked broken) Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and brown is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn’t say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don’t know if you are going to like something because you haven’t tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you don’t like and you don’t choose these, and then it is simple.