Helen Rappaport will talk about her new book, Magnificent Obsession, at Blackwell Bookshop in Oxford.

More info

To celebrate the release of Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu's fantastically twisted Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, Windmill Books, in association with Waterstone's, are giving you the chance to win an exclusive sampler of the first two chapters! All you have to do is answer the following question:

What is the name of the undead substitute teacher in Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People?

Click here for a clue, and to see some of the wicked and malicious characters from the book. Send your answer to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk with your name and address, and you will be entered for the draw. Winners announced 1st November at 5pm. Good luck!

There’s a chill in the air, the leaves and turning, so don your favourite pair of fingerless gloves and join us for another edition of the Windmill Friday Feeling.

Will Self’s writing room has been on the blog before, and today I read his amazing piece The Trouble With my Blood. Beautiful and not a little discomfiting.

As the half life between ‘Thing’ and ‘Ironic tumblr about Thing’ decreases yet more, we have Sh*t That Siri Says, dedicated to people trying to trick the robot inside the iPhone 4S. (One day soon there will be ironic tumblr blogs about things that don’t even exist yet, at which point I will give up on the internet forever and live in a cave. Probably. Until I get bored.)

The peerless xkcd on picking passwords you’ll actually remember. (Now was it wmillbooks with two zeros and a z, or one?)

Ever wanted to see what people were searching for on Wikipedia? No? Well…you can anyway, with this strangely mesmerising website.

Here’s lookin’ at you kid - a gallery of ultra-close up animal eyes. Brilliant.

And finally, we’re a bookish blog so here’s a wordy game from the OED to pass the time. Good weekends all!

‘The Prix Goncourt committee took a record hour and a half to elect The Map and the Territory the winner of France’s highest literary honour … Readers … are unlikely to quibble with the decision.  Houellebecq’s fifth book is not only his best for years but very likely his best ever, a serious novel about ageing and death which employs its author’s trademark wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self parody… a challenging, mature and highly intelligent book’ Daily Telegraph

”[Houellebecq] has shown that the novel can still shock and disturb, still be the subject of passionate debate. We’re not talking about a reality television show or a film or a video game or a rap artist - these are cleverly constructed literary novels. All novelists everywhere have benefited from his audacity‘ William Boyd, Sunday Times

‘If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk…The Map and the Territory is a delight to read … vigorously, enjoyably un-French … [it] skewers the art world’s pretentious jargon and galloping mercantilism … The late novelist John Updike once summed up the conventional view of Houellebecq by deploring the French writer’s “thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity”. The Map and the Territory may force a revision of that judgment.’ Financial Times

‘A great read … Houellebecq, as both his writing and his infrequent forays into public life suggest, doesn’t seem like someone who takes much notice of what people tell him to do. Thank goodness’ Guardian

‘A dark master of invention…From the very first paragraph of this brilliant, often preposterous, Prix Goncourt winning novel, the reader can be in no doubt that they’re in the blistering bleak, darkly inventive grand massif that is Houellebecq land’ Evening Standard

‘The outlaw of French letters returns with an acerbic riff on art and celebrity … A very interesting writer - witty, wildly erudite, with a scattergun approach to the inanities that he sees all around him’ Douglas Kennedy, The Times

‘Houellebecq is an astonishing writer … The Map And The Territory is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. It is, in the sense that the 18^th century philosopher Edmund Burke meant it, sublime’ Scotland on Sunday

‘What on Earth is a French existentialist and winner of France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, doing being reviewed here? He’s not commercial, doesn’t pander to any market, his prose is not always accessible, and certainly doesn’t always zip along. Turned off already? Well don’t be. If ever there was a novelist for our globally dysfunctional times it’s Michel Houellebecq …‘ Henry Sutton, The Mirror (4-star Book of the Week)