The Middle of the Night
by Riley Sager
📖 60/269
It's been almost a week since finishing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and I have been unable to pick up another fiction novel since. Nothing sounded as good and I wasn't yet ready to leave magical England. So I have had a difficult time choosing what to read next. Then my library hold on Riley Sager’s Middle of the Night became available, which made the decision for me.
I love borrowing ebooks from my library, especially when a book I have been waiting for suddenly appears on my Kindle at exactly the right time.
It's Ghostober reading in July. I've heard some people do "Christmas in July", but I like to do "Scary in Summer". 😂
Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett
📖 175/448
Following The Four Horsemen down the rabbit hole — starting with Dennett. (And, yes, I have both the Kindle and physical book 😂)
I love the simple cover of the paperback. Wish my kindle version had the same cover.
Some quotes from Breaking the Spell:
"Miracle-hunters must be scrupulous scientists or else they are wasting their time..." (p. 26)
"One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance." (p. 31)
"Do you ever ask yourself: What if I’m wrong?" (p. 51)
"African animals—have been known to get falling-down drunk eating fermenting fruit from marula trees, and there is evidence that elephants will travel great distances to arrive at the marula trees just when their fruits ripen." (p. 66)
"Sometimes—rarely—religions go bad, veering into something like group insanity or hysteria, and causing great harm. Now that we have created the technologies to cause global catastrophe, our jeopardy is multiplied to the maximum: a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight." (p. 72)
"How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance. They even got shelter and emergency medical care thrown in as a bonus." (pp. 169-170)
Other books I'm reading right now:
A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko
📖 129/488 - A Kindle book I got on sale and it looked really good. Loving it so far.
Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
📖 166/507 - I loved HEX, so I have no idea how I missed this one. I checked the library expecting a hold list, but somehow it was available, so I immediately grabbed it. Update: I am putting this away for a bit. I’m just not liking it the way I thought I would. It might be a DNF, but I will keep it in the running this month.