Happy Halloween Reading! 📖📚

I am looking outside of the house from the fourth floor and enjoying a quiet day. I see the tree tops sprinkled between the neighborhood houses, the cloudy sky and the two books on the table near me, that I want to share a few thoughts about.

The Book of Night by Holly Black

Horror stories are not my favorite genre so how did this book land on my bookcase?

First of all, it has an original plot, one I have never heard of. The book was a Sunday Times No. 1 Bestseller, definitely helping me to decide to go for it and I liked the cover design a lot!

This has been described as a “dark fantasy story” with a “killer ending” that I also enjoyed reading. The edition I have got has 400 pages and I have finished reading it in around 10 days I guess. A new angle to the magicians world with a good pace and a character that in the end was determined to do the impossible to save her love.

Reading this book was similar to trespassing from Yin to Yang or vice versa. You know when someone is all “Love and Light” and then they go and peek at the Dark! Someone who was annoyed at my “think positive attitude” asked me back then if I cannot get into trouble 😵‍💫 because I want to live as a Soul? Of course I also have troubles and challenges. This is not Paradise after all. So there it is, the “other side”, the world of the Shadows.

Shadow Dance by David Richo

This is an older edition (1999), I have read this book around 20 years ago and I took it out of the bookcase because I will read it again soon.

The subtitle “Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side” says a lot and indeed summarizes the content of this book very well. My guess is that we experience a lot of persons who live out their Dark Sides blindly nowadays and it’s a lot of chaos and turmoil in the outer world. Only because this outer world is the consequence of the chaos and turmoil a lot of us experience in our minds and feelings.

There is a lot of food for thought here. Being a nerd all the way from first grade to finishing university 1999, I sometimes felt that I was not free to show myself the way that I was and couldn’t find a solution to that old situation. A lot of people are searching happiness and one path towards this is to practise positive thinking. Well, it goes around like a wheel, light going to dusk, night then dawn and light again.

To quote David Richo:

Too much light creates a longing for night.