Getting you ready for the weekend, here’s a selection of bookish and not so bookish links that have been keeping us amused at Windmill HQ.

We like The Oatmeal for it’s many deranged comics, none more so that “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell”. Almost makes me glad I didn’t insist on having the office dog stream of consciousness section on the Windmill homepage. Almost.

When I was quite young (well, 16) I tried to navigate London using a tube map. It didn’t work - here’s why.

This looks amazing: a holiday where you go to a country house, get fed and watered, and all you have to do is read. All the time. Sign me up immediately.

Finally, a moment to pay tribute to J D Salinger, who died at the age of 91 in his home on Wednesday. A giant of literature who shunned celebrity, we are left not remembering a personality but the writing itself. The 60 million copies of The Catcher in the Rye sold attest to his huge impact. The Guardian summed it up well, and The Daily Beast has a gallery of Holden Caulfield-influeced characters. So long Mr Salinger, sticking one to all the phonies to the end.

When I was a boy I walked into the desert in spring to search for rattlesnakes. When the sun rose high enough and the winter days were gone the snakes would come up out of the earth and bask upon the heated stones at the foot of the mountains. I loved the snakes and I would search the old places where I had seen them in other years. Cold-blooded, the snakes were sluggish when they first rose from the earth. I used to walk carefully among them, some of the large females four feet long, their bodies thick as a man’s forearm.

I remember searching for the young snakes, the ones that had just recently been born. They were often coiled together, their skins and scales bright in the sun. How old was I, eight or nine, my body thin and lithe as a willow wand. The little rattlesnakes were perhaps a foot long, no more. I would take a forked stick and carefully unwind them from the coiled balls their bodies had made and then I would lean down and pick one or another of the snakes up, holding them just behind their heads. I loved it when their bodies curled around my wrist. I was gentle with them and always careful for I knew the babies were as poisonous as the adults and I didn’t want to get bitten.

I remember one day lying down at the edge of the stone circle where the snakes warmed themselves and there I fell asleep. When I woke an hour later a dozen snakes were curled around my body, one large female lying against my belly, another in the curl of my arm. It took a few minutes for me to unwind myself. I remember not being afraid. If anything, I was in awe that they had trusted me enough to warm themselves against me.

This little story takes me back to my novel Red Dog, Red Dog and the young man, Tom Stark, who is the central character. While Tom is not me and the book is a fiction, I think this is something that he might have done, for the setting of the novel is in the high desert country of my childhood and youth. I think Tom Stark would have liked snakes just as he loved the wasps that visited his bedroom every autumn.

We build our fictions from our lives. Our characters are imagined people in imagined places and their actions create the stories that define us, that tell us who we are. That little boy who lay down and slept among the rattlesnakes in the Okanagan hills was me. It was a long time ago, 1947 or 1948, sixty years ago at least. I remember that country well and though the rattlesnakes of the place are rare now and hard to find, I would still like to go among them if only to be trusted as I once was among such lords of the world.

Red Dog, Red Dog is published in February. Order it from Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, or from your highstreet bookshop.

Welcome all followers new and old to Windmill - a shiny new site for a shiny new publisher. We want you to get to know what we’re all about, which is why we’re giving away five Windmill Books hampers*, each containing:

Plus:

A Windmill Books notebook, AND a set of fancy book postcards.

To win, all you have to do is tell me in the comments section below is: what pop duet featured in Mrs Ballard’s parrot vignettes? I’ll pick five winner at random in ten minutes - go go go!

Windmill Books picked up a number of great reviews this week, here are the highlights:

‘Witheringly funny … A rock memoir in the misanthropic vein of Lucky Jim‘ Robert Sandall, The Sunday Times

Read the full review

‘[A] cleverly plotted and elegantly written novel…Unsworth has evidently done a great deal of research, but this is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the novel so that the reader is caught up in the excitement of Somerville’s discoveries’ Peter Parker, The Sunday Times

Read the full review

‘I’ve read lots of books about economics this last year.  This is one of the very best … Superb’ William Leith, Evening Standard

‘A fluent and indirect paean to Keynesian economics…this resonates with the contemporary turmoil in global financial markets’ James Urquhart, Financial Times

Read the full review

‘Ahamed unravels the story of the most terrible financial collapse in history from the perspective of the four men who were largely responsible: the leading central bankers in the United States, Britain, France and Germany’ Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

On the first Friday back to work, snow and icy winds abound, I think we’re all sorely in need of a light distraction to get the weekend started.

An oldie but a goody first, with Carl Warner’s ingenious foodscapes, that either makes me queasy or hungry or both (qungry?)

There’s a lot of good stuff on TED, and this talk is one of the best on there: Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity.

Courtesy of carolagent, these beautifully designed books made from papier mache.

Back when I was a dewy eyed marketing assistant, the publisher I used to work for was moving offices. As you can imagine, the offices of publishing houses get fairly chock-a-bloc with books, and this was no different - wall-to-wall, in every nook, cranny and crevice: books.

As we were doing the almighty week-long clearout, I spied the edge of another book that had fallen down the back of a filing cabinet. It was a little dusty, but otherwise in good nick, with a note from an American agent to a long-gone MD. The book was Mrs. Ballard’s Parrots, surely one of the strangest, most idiosyncratic and yet honest books I have ever come across.

It has since become one of my prized possessions. Not only because of how delightfully odd it is (though I love giving it to people when they come over to watch their reactions to the ‘Sonny and Cher’ parrot vignettes) but because of how I got it. Never published in the UK, forgotten about in my old office down the back of a filing cabinet, found by chance by someone (I like to think) who appreciates surreal humour, especially earnest surreal humour, particularly earnest, surreal humour with Polaroids of parrots dressed up and placed in homemade miniature sceneries. It’s like the book was waiting for me, its perfect reader.

This book isn’t profound, doesn’t particularly inform me or reveal anything about myself (beyond the above mentioned taste for weirdness), yet because I found it the way I did it has become a favourite. Other books like this are ones I’ve bought after readings, especially if I hadn’t heard of the author before. There’s something about that sense of discovery that raises a book another notch, so if the book is particularly good, then it feels almost like it discovered me, a bolt from the blue.

Does anyone else have books like this? And does the way you find a book affect your opinion of it?

Author and historian Helen Rappaport will be touring around the country talking about her writing through 2010. For full details please visit Helen’s official site.