Or maybe you just want to scare the holy bejesus out of yourself...

If I’d just stumbled out of a coma this morning, I’d still know what time of year it was. The air has a savage bite to it and a faint touch of sulphur. It’s getting dark a little earlier every evening and the urge to stay in bed of a morning is that wee bit stronger.

It must be nearly Halloween.

It’s easy to forget amid all of the rubber masks and plastic pumpkins filled with sweeties that Halloween is in fact the Celtic New Year. That’s right, the bountiful summer is over and the promise of a bitter winter lies on the horizon.

This was never supposed to be the time to knock on doors demanding treats – it’s always been the time for humankind to realise its place in the universe and know that nature is planning a cull. Halloween is when we remember that all things must come to an end. So in the face of death, our ancestors thought it better to throw a big party rather than hide in the shadows.

Bit of a bleak start to the blog, I know, but give me a break here, it’s bloody cold and I heard something about Siberian geese that didn’t sound to promising at all.

So, if there are any open fires left in the houses of the world, then I urge you to spark them up and get the tea on because it’s time for a ghost story. I’m not just speculating either; the publishing world will back me up on this one by releasing a flurry of spectral tales within a couple of weeks of each other.

You can always count on Susan Hill for a good old fashioned ghost story and her latest offering, The Small Hand, doesn’t disappoint. At least that’s what I’ve been told by reliable sources. I’ll get round to reading it eventually but for now, the best I can do is to recommend her previous spooky yarns, most notably The Woman in Black.

By the way, if you ever want to scare a surprise into your undies, don’t pass up the chance to watch the stage show of the same name. We’re talking old-school horror here. Think the Turn of the Screw or the Fall of the House of Usher and you’re on the right track.

Michelle Paver’s new book is full of chills too. If you’ve ever been a teenager with a leaning towards pre-historical fiction, then you’ll probably remember her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. Dark Matter is a different animal altogether as it is set in the post-tool-age era, more specifically, the 1930’s and follows an Arctic expedition that takes a turn for the weird when people start to go missing. It’s a great chiller filled with existential paranoia and a mounting claustrophobia – just what you need for the winter – but, genre aside, it’s just well paced, well written, throat-gripping yarn.

And just when you thought it was safe to into your local bookstore, Peter Ackroyd’s new book, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time, quite nearly takes the piss with its thoroughness. It’s not a ghost story as such but rather an exploration into the history of ghosts in England. In this case, the fourth wall is pretty well broken down so you won’t get the immersive dread of an actual ghost story but that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

The book itself is as much a very specific story of the English as it is a description of the ghosts they see. Not only will you learn something but you won’t feel like you’re sitting through a lecture – Ackroyd’s writing flows with a lilt of humour that makes the book a very compelling read.

Or maybe you just want to scare the holy bejesus out of yourself...

Why not try Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill. Set in modern-day London, this is a haunted house tale for the 21st century. Not only does the book deliver a strange unearthly presence wrought with doom, he also brings to life the very real horrors of modern life in the stories of the inhabitants of the block. If you think that you’ve become too desensitised by torture-porn (Saw, Hostel) to enjoy an old fashioned horror story, then maybe this is the book for you.

Anyway, hopefully none of that will give you nightmares. I’m away to carve a pumpkin onto a pumpkin. I bet no-one has thought of that before.

Book of the Day 016

No fudgin' comment...

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Book of the Day 015

The fat man isn't the benevolent chuckle-bucket you thought he was. He is, in fact, an eccentric quantum physicist with a range of future-technologies in his arsenal - like Dr Robotnik.

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Book of the Day 014

Do you like a good western? This is more raw, more gruesome and more unforgiving than anything you've seen before. Neither Wayne nor Eastwood could handle this kind of brutality. This is the Wild West with all of the good bits left in. Awesome!

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Book of the Day 013

Four of Edgar Allen Poe's most chilling stories complete with Gris Grimly's warped illustrations. It'll give you nightmares, so be careful.

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Book of the Day 012

How about this - a whole novel written without the letter 'E'. Gimmick or genius? You decide.

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Book of the Day 011

This book taught me a lot about glove-making. The rest went over my head a little bit so that must mean that it is, in some way, clever... more clever than me at least.

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Book of the Day 010

Got a problem with the neighbours? Yours is a two-word solution - 'potato cannon'!

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...if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die...

You know what - I’m really getting a bit sick of the Good Ol’ Days.

Ever since this financial apocalypse thing started, more and more people find the need to draw a parallel between now and the golden age of the ration book, back in the days when you couldn’t get sugar and your chicken was reconstituted breadcrumbs and lard moulded into a rough chicken shape.

It sounds to me like a hellish era of enforced austerity but apparently I’m in the minority. The masses seem to have come to the conclusion that they’d much rather be spit-roasting squirrels on the embers of the blitz that sitting in front of their freeview ACDCHDTVDVD iGadget wondering which button turns it on.

Okay, so I’m not old enough to remember Spam but it’s not as if I’m a cyber-child, born into a luxurious world of convenience. I’ve lived through some hard times too.

I remember when Teletext was the Internet and satellite TV was something the Americans had. Sure, you’ve got your Xboxes and Playstations now, but back in my day we had Joust and Chuckie Egg or, if we were lucky enough to have a friend with rich parents, we also had Streets of Rage.

Back in my day, a mobile telephone was a regular telephone with an extra-long cable. We used to hide the cable up our sleeve and pretend we were on Dallas. Those were the days before 4OD and BBC iplayer, when, if you wanted to watch something, you had to set your VCR to record it. You’d invariably hang around until your show started to make sure that it did what you told it to at which point you’d just sit down and watch it on the telly anyway. Just as well too because while you were watching ITV, the VCR was recording BBC1.

But I digress.

Maybe things were gentler in the past. Maybe they were simpler and less manic. Maybe there were more cows in the fields and less hoodies on every corner but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were better. The point I’m trying to make is that if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die.

‘Where has this sudden burst of indignation come from?’, I hear you ask. I’ll tell you where – Alan Bloody Titchmarch. Granted, he’s not the only culprit in the retrovolution but he’s the most persistent and the easiest to remember. His latest book, predictably entitled ‘When I was a Nipper’, is an illustrated jaunt back to his boyhood which he mostly spent on his bike delivering Hovis down the cobbles to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9.

Thank you again, Wikipedia.

Now, I would have read some of Alan’s book for professional accuracy but I was so disgusted that I just had to leave immediately and find someone to film me happy-slapping a moving statue. So, since I’m unable to quote an extract, I’ll just make a stab at guessing.

“I remember old Mr. Brown who used to own the beige van on Bland Street. I was delivering some ‘ovis to him one midsummer morning when I fell off of my bike. Some rapscallion had left an old sea-mine in the middle of the road and who ran into it only muggins here. Mrs Mustardey, the baker, was in a right tizzy when she heard the sound of ticking coming from the mine. Luckily, Mr Brown knew a chap in the Ministry of Explosions who promptly sent the instructions for disposal in a telegram. They read simply - open mine, cut blue wire, bob’s your uncle. So Mr. Brown, dutiful as always, got the old boy opened but there was no blue wire, just different shades of brown because in them days, everything was in sepia...”

And so on, and so forth. That’s what I imagine anyway, some meandering lecture about how dull the dishwater was – ‘but it were real dishwater in them days, none of your Cillit-Flash nonsense.’ But you can imagine things for yourself; you don’t need me to do that for you, right?

Too right, and you don’t need Titchmarsh and his ilk doing it for you either, because, let’s be honest, the good old days probably weren’t all that great. In fact, all of these old-school anecdotes probably didn’t actually happen at all – it’s a scientifically proven fact that most of your most treasured childhood memories didn’t happen to you – they happened to someone else

...on BBC1

...when you were trying to record ITV.

Book of the Day 009

No time to read the best books of the last hundred years? No problem!

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Book of the Day 008

This is a great book to laugh at - just because it exists

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Book of the Day 007

A horror story in which a group of animals gain self awareness and wage war on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This edition features illustrations by Ralph Steadman, rubber-stamping it 'cult'.

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Book of the Day 006

This book'll make you laugh, and then wonder why you bothered...but in a good way.

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Book of the Day 005

There are only 7 stories and this book describes them in 700 pages.

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Book of the Day 004

(@Gerrards Cross Book Fair) This is fun - a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about drugs, 50's anti-drug propaganda and great cartoons. Kept me entertained.

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Book of the Day 003

Five people come together in an airport cocktail lounge in the middle of a global catastrophe. Sounds awesome!

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Put the Book Back on the Shelf

Okay, I’m listening to a stream of the new Belle and Sebastian Album, Write About Love, (available here until the 12th of October) It’s too early to say whether or not I like it. In the meantime, I’d like to bring to your attention a few literary links you might not be aware of.

Don’t mention it.

Well, obviously, the first link has to be Cécile Aubry, French actress-turned-author who wrote the novel, Belle et Sébastien, a boy-and-his-dog story set in a village in the French Alps. It was adapted as a television show, also called Belle et Sébastien which ran on French TV from 1965 until 1970. It was reinterpreted in 1981 in the form of Japanese anime, Meiken Jolie before being recycled once again as a Glaswegian indie band.

Their song, Seymour Stein, was featured in the movie, High Fidelity (based of course, on Nick Hornby’s novel of the same name.) You remember the scene, right? Jack Black walks into John Cusack’s store, criticises the song because ‘unfortunately, it sucks ass’, then he puts on Katrina and the Waves instead.

Just to clarify, I have read the novel as well, but only the once and the whole way through, all I could hear in my head was John Cusack trying to do a London accent.

The song in question appears on their ’98 album, The Boy With the Arab Strap which is either their best album or a parody of their previous work, depending on how you look at it. I think it’s a genuine work of art and deserves to be enjoyed by everyone at least once.

The next link is Washington Irving.

If you listen to the end of track six on their 1996 debut, Tigermilk, you can hear Isobel Campbell talking incessantly in a torrent of nonsense. It turns out that it’s not just any nonsense; it’s a passage from Rip Van Winkle, Irving’s famous short story about the man who fell asleep and woke up twenty years later with a beard.

They don’t write them like that anymore.

Anybody like graphic novels? Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle & Sebastian Anthology, is a collection of comic strips based on Belle and Sebastian Songs. I’d say whether it was a good idea or not but, to be honest, I’ve just found out about it – how’s that for preparation! Watch this space, I’ll let you know.

As for the new album...it's growing on me.

Book of the Day 002

From Korean Penis Fish to curried dog on a stick, this book is filled with a whole menu of stuff you'd never eat.

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Book of the Day 001

These limited edition 70th anniversary Puffin hardbacks arrived today. Each one comes in a tidy perspex slipcase and they are priced at a meager 100 bucks. Pictured is The Secret Garden with some very fine decoupage. Check the Penguin website for more details.

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What's in your bathroom?

Back again, for another exciting episode of the Book Thing. It’s been seven long days of biting your nails down to the knuckle and abseiling from the edge of your seat, but you can relax now, the fun is allowed to continue.

Now, I know what you must be thinking. It’s a question that has been on your mind for quite some time, I’m sure and it’s only right that I give you an answer. Besides, it’s getting a little embarrassing now – I can’t walk down the street anymore, I have to wear a disguise, just so I don’t have to listen to the same thing over and over again, everywhere I turn.

“So come on, tell me, what’s in your bathroom?”

Well, hopefully, by the time I’ve finished this, you will all have a bit of closure and maybe I will have a little peace.

Obviously I don’t need to tell you that the bathroom book is a special kind of animal. Its job is to deliver a quick burst of information and amusement without going into any great depth. Nobody likes cold knees and it’s for this reason that Wuthering Heights will never be considered a bona fide Bathroom Book. Not by me, at least.

I think, when you’re in that ridiculous, yet completely natural position, a book is an excellent way to take your mind off of your predicament. Take laughter, for example...

If you like the way your laugh sounds in a bathroom, you should give Calvin and Hobbes another go. I say ‘another go’ because I assume you have already had the pleasure.

But let’s suppose you don’t know, hypothetically, like. Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip created by Bill Watterson in which Calvin is a hyperactive little boy with a wild imagination and Hobbes is his pet tiger, or his stuffed toy.

They play, they fight, they get in all kinds of mischief for which Hobbes invariably gets blamed, but Calvin just can’t understand why Hobbes never gets punished. When they finally sit still, it’s only to say something that’s so childishly simple as to be profound.

I can’t speak for everyone else, but it’s very easy to become attached to the characters. I still get choked up when I think about the time that Calvin lost Hobbes. It went on for a good four or five episodes, before finally Hobbes... actually, I’m sure you remember where he was.

It’s actually possible to become TOO attached to the characters. Sometimes, when I’ve nothing better to do, I think about what became of the duo. It breaks my heart because I know that Calvin grew up and made friends with real people. More than likely he forgot about his adventures with Hobbes who is probably sitting on a shelf in his dormitory, a silent witness to God knows what kind of depravity.

But then I remember that they aren’t real.

And that offers no consolation.

Maybe you don’t care for laughter. Perhaps you’re the kind of person so riddled with doubt that the very act of excreting waste reminds you that you are just another animal and that just fills you with existential melancholy and self-loathing.

Well, what better toilet read than our old friend Nietzsche?

I’d have to recommend a Nietzsche detour to anyone hopelessly in search of the right answer. What I would say, however, is BE CAREFUL! If you take it too seriously, you might just come to the conclusion that the human race is a collective of selfish bastards constantly lying to themselves.

If you can withstand an assault of nihilistic cynicism, you might be able to trawl through the nuggets of hopelessness to find the odd gem, like this one –

“He who lives to fight an enemy has an interest in that enemy’s survival.”

I’m paraphrasing, but the meaning is intact. That’s just one example.

No other examples spring to mind.

So, let’s say you’re one of those people who don’t see the point of humanity, but still want a good laugh. Let’s say you drift through the world, increasingly disgusted by each new fad and you just feel so alone. If only you knew that there was someone else out there who, like you, sees civilisation as a great waste of time.

Well, look no longer! You should be reading Charlie Brooker!

He started out writing reviews for PC Gamer, to supplement his marijuana supply and worked his way up the chain to where he is now – writing for the Guardian. His latest book, The Hell of It All, is another collection of witty, scathing and, on occasion, desperate columns published between August of 2007 and September 2009.

He usually talks about television but he can throw in the odd geeky reference that no one would understand unless they’d played Resident Evil 2 or watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When he’s not admitting to a legacy of wasted time, he’s been known to paint elaborate portraits of brutal accidents, Armageddon and ironic justice.

If you mix Tim Bisley from Spaced and Bernard from Black books, then delete the Irish accent, you’ve got some warped, subjective approximation that probably doesn’t even come close.

His other two books (Screen Burn and Dawn of the Dumb) are just as good despite being a little dated now, but you can revel in nostalgia at those great TV moments. You can relive the excitement of the first ever series of Big Brother and watch how the excitement quickly turned to disgust.

Remember that?

That was a fun time.