A History of Ghosts, Spirits, and the Supernatural from DK Publishing
Halloween month is officially upon us, meaning that it is now our duty to get spooky. (Make no mistake: I fully endorse year-round spookiness, so if you were already creeping and crawling, by all means, carry on. Though I do object to the appearance of Halloween candy on supermarket shelves in midsummer, which seems to me to signal a callous lack of reverence for the wheel of the year. No one should be eating mellowcreme pumpkins in July. It’s practically sacrilege.) For those seeking literary inspiration to skulk into the spirit of the season, I would advise a twilight session with DK’s A History of Ghosts, Spirits, and the Supernatural. This stately compendium is one you can judge by its cover without shame, for it is a thing of beauty: midnight-hued and silver-foiled, its bats and bones and border of gnarled thorns shimmering as if moonlit. Once opened, the book offers a wide-ranging survey of the supernatural in myth, folklore, art, and literature from cultures around the world and across history. Within its 320 illustrated pages you’ll find haunted houses, ghost dogs, poltergeists, spiritualist séances, and all manner of wraiths and apparitions. The articles are pithy but informative, suitable either to introduce the casual dabbler, or, among more committed students of the weird, as a springboard for further research. And as a tip to interested readers: keep an eye peeled this month for other new additions to the library’s paranormal studies collection, targeted for expansion by popular demand!
Other relevant titles to consider:
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
“The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention,” wrote Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher and political activist lately canonized as a modern-day saint. For Weil, the simple, rigorous labor of attention is the force at the core of prayer, a practice by which one moves past the petty noise of the ego and towards communion with a far vaster consciousness. Weil has been on my mind this year, and as a consequence I’ve been brought into an uncomfortable confrontation with my own flagging and faltering powers of attention. I know I am not alone in this. If anything, we are living in a period of extreme inattention, with ample cause for concern about the state of our creative genius as a result. But can we remedy our collective attention deficit, or are we locked into the discord of living as distracted, creatively desiccated chronic multi-taskers? Novelist Elizabeth Rosner advocates for what she calls “deep listening” as one technique for exercising our senses to recover our attentive faculties in her graceful and perceptive new book, Third Ear. Rosner’s study slips fluidly between inquiries into sound and its reception – bird song and whale song, soundscapes inside the womb, the latest discoveries in interspecies communication – and interludes of personal narrative recalling her own experiences with a multilingual upbringing and a hearing loss scare. Along the way she consults a retinue of musicians, translators, acoustic biologics, and psychologists, peppering her text with their aural expertise. When we attune ourselves to the sonic, Rosner writes, we allow ourselves a new (or perhaps renewed) openness to the clamoring world, the soft but constant thrum we’ve grown too used to speaking over.
For fans of Jenny Odell, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard. It would also harmonize nicely with Ed Yong’s An Immense World (2021).