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Fiction skeptic books?

Wudang said:
Have you seen the new Scooby Doo movies? The monsters are real - evil spirits that possess people.
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ETA: I don't think that is the New Scooby Doo Movies. Those are the ones with celebrity guests from back in the early 70s (according to my Direct TV guide, the episode with Don Adams is 1973). I think you are talking about "What's New, Scooby Doo" which is the 2003 version. The 5 pm episode on HUB has the gang traveling into the future in the Mystery Machine.

But yeah, that blows.

The kids have a Scooby Doo book where all the "ghosts" are basically Shaggy and Scoopy's over-imagination. Or complete idiocy, as the case may be. For example, one of the stories is about the gang getting stuck in a snow storm on a ski mountain. The ghosts or whatever are just Daphne/Velma/Fred covered in snow. Or there is a blow-up water dragon that they think is a sea serpent. Or there is an evil looking beast that looks like a truck with a face. Because it is. But they think it is a monster.

The lamest is the apple thief. They are picking apples, but when they get to the end, all the apples are gone! The think it is a ghost apple thief. Somehow, they missed the hole in the bottom of their apple bucket.

My kids are 3 and 5, and even then, the response was, how stupid are they?

Even in the old Scooby Doo shows with the Globetrotters or whatever, Velma is like, "Don't they know that there's no such thing as ghosts?"
 
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In a burst of delicious irony, some of the best skeptical mysteries are G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Despite the author's and protagonist's devout religious beliefs, every one of the mysteries is solved via application of reason alone. As Father Brown himself explains, he never seeks a supernatural explanation for mysteries because he isn't superstitious.
 
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum seems to be a literary Dan Brown at first, but it transpires that spotting fake patterns and obsessions and sharpsooter's falacy (IIRC not explicitally named) are the real explanation.

Asked whether he had read the Brown novel, Eco replied:

I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.

– But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel.
No. In Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures
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One of Umberto Eco's more readable books, though not as much fun as The Name of the Rose
 
jimbob said:
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum seems to be a literary Dan Brown at first, but it transpires that spotting fake patterns and obsessions and sharpsooter's falacy (IIRC not explicitally named) are the real explanation.



One of Umberto Eco's more readable books, though not as much fun as The Name of the Rose
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Seconded, every comment.
 
kittynh said:
This person needs more skepticism, and he's not interested in non fiction... but he did actually learn a lot from the mystery novel.

Any suggestions for a good list of FICTION books that help pass on the skeptic message?
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I just finished a Connie Willis novella about researchers at a skeptic magazine called The Jaundiced Eye investigating a fraudulent psychic channeler who might actually be involuntarily possessed by the ghost of a famous skeptic
Henry Louis Mencken
and how they (the researchers) learned to cope with being caught in such a conundrum.

en.wikipedia.org

Inside Job (novella) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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