Halloween Book Reviews by Chloe Blades

How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds by The School of Life (The School of Life, 2022)

Learning about how modern media destroys our minds is more terrifying than a dark night alone watching The Sixth Sense; a child who can see dead people is, at face value, more reason to be afraid. Yet contemporary Philosopher Alain de Botton, co-founder of the reputable international School of Life, shows how modern media is responsible for stoking overwhelming degrees of hatred and distraction while sending the population into a head-bending state of anxiety and confusion. They ask, what must be happening in our minds in the face of so much that we are exposed to? Social media is developed to coerce your attention; trolls are bating you, big-tech are harvesting your data and targeting you, and media outlets are delivering images and stories on demand that are more often triggering in some form. How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds is a guide on how to reject the varied toxins placed in our mental bloodstreams by certain sections of mass media, and become more aware of what it is we are being injected by and how to take better care of ourselves. These issues with modern media keep me awake more than the lucid vision of a demon exorcised out of Emily Rose on my ceiling, so this read was a welcome one.

French Chateau Style by Catherine Scotto and Marie Pierre Morel (Prestel, 2022)

This isn't scary at all, you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Firstly, there’s something terrifying about how the pages in this beautiful tome of French interiors puts into perspective the shortness of life. It’s unlikely any of us will be fulfilling the dream of owning one of the 13 chateaux in here, like Le Pourtaou de Jean Rameau, not least because Jacqueline Sarthou is its heiress, albeit one who’s mildly irritated at the burdensome inheritance. There’s a captivating lesson in history that runs parallel to each chateau, and in this one it details the tragedy that befell poet Jean Rameau’s son at the Battle of Verdun in WWI and his wife’s subsequent death from a broken heart.

Apparently Jean’s spirit haunts the humblest recesses of the great house. Secondly, there are 44,000 heritage sites in various states of repair across France, and nearly half of those are chateaux, and Catherine Scotto traversed Normandy to Provence and everywhere in between to discover who lived in these dilapidated marvels of masonry alongside photographer Marie Pierre Morel. That’s a huge artistic feat; it gives me shivers just thinking about all that work. There’s a haunting in the naturally-lit photographs with their hues of dark shades, yet they capture the life within every brick, crack, and wallpaper scrap. The energy of the great chambers and archway-lined stone staircases is alluring, and it doesn’t take much to close your eyes and grasp what life was like then and could be now if you owned one of these chateaux.