50 book challenge. Book 7.
Mar. 15th, 2007 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deliriumcrowMark Srorr vs the Supernatural, Mark Storr.
Right, so there's an English sceptic, and he reads about an American Eccentric, who cals himself a demonologist. So he jots off to America to do a story about him, expecting to see all sorts of shammery or at least superstition. At any rate, something to laugh at. And then Really Weird Things start happening.
Through the rest of the book (that's the introduction there, just made very, very short and not hald as interesting) Mr Storr investigates all manner of Things Ghostly and Unexplained, and reaches various conclusions about various people, living and dead. He also ponders a great deal about the afterlife, and the meaning of life, and if there *is* a meaning, or if we're actually just zombies, wandering about for no bloody reason. He also contemplates the fact that scepticism is, in fact, a belief, making its claim to be all about beliving nothing a great paradox.
The odd behaviour of quantum particles under observation is also addressed, to interesting effect.
To give away the ending (it's not a surprise, really) he does not re-find his lost Catholicism (probably needs to sweep out under his bed a bit better...) but does develop a belief in ghosts, under pressure of what he considers overwhelming evidence. And it's about 300 pages of evidence, both damning and confirming. Some of the people he ran into ... well, they're sort of nutty. Some of them, not so much.
And it left in the British spellings and punctuation. :)
Right, so there's an English sceptic, and he reads about an American Eccentric, who cals himself a demonologist. So he jots off to America to do a story about him, expecting to see all sorts of shammery or at least superstition. At any rate, something to laugh at. And then Really Weird Things start happening.
Through the rest of the book (that's the introduction there, just made very, very short and not hald as interesting) Mr Storr investigates all manner of Things Ghostly and Unexplained, and reaches various conclusions about various people, living and dead. He also ponders a great deal about the afterlife, and the meaning of life, and if there *is* a meaning, or if we're actually just zombies, wandering about for no bloody reason. He also contemplates the fact that scepticism is, in fact, a belief, making its claim to be all about beliving nothing a great paradox.
The odd behaviour of quantum particles under observation is also addressed, to interesting effect.
To give away the ending (it's not a surprise, really) he does not re-find his lost Catholicism (probably needs to sweep out under his bed a bit better...) but does develop a belief in ghosts, under pressure of what he considers overwhelming evidence. And it's about 300 pages of evidence, both damning and confirming. Some of the people he ran into ... well, they're sort of nutty. Some of them, not so much.
And it left in the British spellings and punctuation. :)
