“Impossible Things: Unbelievable Answers to the World’s Weirdest Questions” by Dan Schreiber
I love Dan Schreiber’s work. I listen to every single episode of “There’s No Such Thing As a Fish” podcast stretching back several years now, I also regularly listen to his other podcast “We Can Be Weirdos”, while his book “The Theory of Everything Else” is among my favorites of all time.
Hence, when he wrote a new book I immediately purchased it, no matter what it is about. As it turns out, it is another incredible book that covers a wide range of bizarre and impossible questions, this time questions asked by curious children where he is answering them all with concise clarity and sufficient amount of details, but not too much that it could overwhelm them.
That’s right, this is a book written for children (including me, a 500 months-old kid). And in a way this is perfect, since children have not been molded into our status-quo way of thinking, hence the questions can be pretty out-of-the-box. And that’s exactly where Dan excels. It is a well written and very interesting book, complete with all the drawings and quick fact boxes to make the reading experience kinda interractive, which makes it hard to put down once we start reading it (I devoured it within 24 hours).
It covers topics such as Loch Ness monster, Unicorn, Elf in Iceland, Yeti hunting in Bhutan, and Mongolian death worm. It also discusses everything about ghosts: their ghost hunters, the most haunted places, the oldest ghost ever recorded in history – a Babylonian ghost. It talks about aliens: including the earliest record of a UFO sightings (in 1947), The Roswell incident, those who secretly live among us (like David Bowie and Elvis Presley), Stephen Hawking’s scary comment about aliens, even entertaining the thought that maybe WE are the aliens that migrated to Earth from another planet.
Moreover, the book also talk bout time travel, about physic intuition, telepathy, telekinesis, learning to speak with trees and animals, about imaginary friend, immortality and its elixir of life, vampires, cursed items, on bad luck, the scenario that dinosaurs went to the moon before us, the possibility that we actually living in a Matrix, and for the love of [anything] can you please tell me who is “He Who Shall Also Not Be Named” and what was his cursed book?
All in all, it is such a fun book to read. It is the kind of book that teaches us to take things lighter, to accept that some things are still unexplainable, to not be a skeptic and instead to be open minded for all possibilities, even towards the ideas and imaginations that are just almost impossible. Afterall, a lot of things that are parts of our normal lives today were once considered as impossible, like refrigerator, the flying machine that we all now called airplanes, or purchasing Dan’s book on a Kindle app on my phone and completed reading it while being stuck on a taxi in a traffic jam in Jakarta – all done without visiting any physical bookstore. Explain that to your great great great grandfather.
THE CHAOS THEORY 