Thanks for reading Spook with me!

Thanks for reading Spook with me during the month of October!

To wrap up, did you find that the book influenced your beliefs in an afterlife or lack thereof?

Why is discussion and research about the existence of an afterlife important, or isn’t it?  

If you’ve read other books by Mary Roach, how did this one hold up to the others? Would you recommend it to friends? Why or why not?

If you are interested in more on this subject, try:

Ghost Hunters: William James and the search for scientific proof of life after death by Deborah Blum

Ghosts Caught on Film: photographs of the paranormal? by Melvyn J. Willin and Ghosts Caught on Film 2 by Jim Eaton

Occult America: the secret history of how mysticism shaped our nation by Mitch Horowitz

Possessions: the history and uses of haunting in the Hudson Valley by Judith Richardson

The Perfect Medium: photography and the occult by Yale University Press

Spook: on the author…

Mary Roach is quite a present figure in Spook; how does her narration add to or detract from the book? Why do you think she chose to write the book based on her own experience? Is there such a thing as being too skeptical? What do you think of her use of humor?

Spook: reading group guide questions

The publisher’s reading group guide for Mary Roach’s Spook has some great questions:

In Spook, Mary Roach explores a great variety of answers humankind has come up with to explain the soul’s destiny. Despite their diversity, do these theories reveal any universal qualities of the human imagination?

Roach encounters numerous researchers attempting to connect spirituality with material evidence. Isn’t the relationship between spirituality and physicality inherently antithetical?

In Chapter Six, Roach describes several skeptics’ schemes for trying to establish contact with the dead through coded messages established prior to subjects’ deaths. Can you think of a foolproof test for ascertaining a medium’s reliability?

Roach reports that our likelihood of believing in a given paranormal phenomenon increases with our intimacy with the source of the story, with family members proving most credible. Is there a lesson in this?