It’s the weekend and spring is in the air, so here’s our selection of bookish and not-so-bookish marvels from our ranges across the internets this week.

The people at Ikea have made the world’s longest outdoor bookcase on Bondi Beach, Sydney. If you can bring yourself to see how tanned everyone is, check it out.

In this fascinating article, an archeological dig in Turkey is turning upside-down our ideas of how civilisation first came into being.

OK Go are making a habit out of having very cool music videos: their treadmill one a while back was the first. This one however, with a Rube Goldberg machine falling apart beautifully around them, is even better.

And if you haven’t listened already, our very own Kevin Dutton reveals the art of extreme persuasion through undercover SAS operatives, Monty Python, and Howard Marks. His very persuasive book Flipnosis is out in May.

Do we believe in coincidences? I was all set to write a Turbine Blog post for the lovely people at Windmill about a familial coincidence I uncovered whilst researching the true murder case which features in my novel, The Finest Type of English Womanhood, but now, to be frank, I’m confused. (By the way this subject has been politely negotiated between Harvey and myself, as I had an urgent desire to share with the world the dramatic highs and lows of my search for a suitable dress to wear to the Costa Book Awards; Harvey however remained polite, implacable but firm on the subject).

So, I was going to spin out my tale, with its surprising and shocking ending, but I find that I’m sitting here suddenly unconvinced that it’s in anyway astonishing or odd or even unlikely, and the more I think about it, the less outlandish or accidental it becomes. I’ve now (almost) decided that it isn’t a coincidence at all but utterly understandable, in fact, if it isn’t too dramatic to say so, inevitable. Not only because of banal common-place factors such as time, incident and place, but also, I’m realizing, because of my grandfather’s extraordinary Zelig-like character. But I’m racing ahead.

Firstly the ‘coincidence’ under question.

When I was researching the history of the Union Castle steamer line - the ships which travelled between Britain and South Africa - I came across the story of Gay Gibson, a young actress murdered aboard the Durban Castle in 1947. The deck steward James Camb was accused of her murder.  Now, the reason I was doing the original research, the fact that I wanted to write about two girls journeying to Johannesburg in that immediate post-war, pre-apartheid era was not coincidental. My grandparents, and my mother, had emigrated there in 1946. As a child, I had been both entranced and disturbed by my grandparents’ photograph albums; my beautiful grandmother in a large hat and scoop-neck dress, my grandfather in a dapper silk suit at a party, holding a glass of champagne, but then, turning the page, a photograph of my mother sitting in the strange garden of her new house in Johannesburg, one hand up to shade her bewildered face, dark circles under eyes, blinking in the sunshine. You could feel the shock of the sun on her pasty, war-rationed skin.

Gay Gibson - just the idea of her - tied in beautifully with what I was interested to write about too; young women trying to figure out who or how you ought to be and what goes wrong when you don’t know.

I went to the British Newspaper library and read on microfilm the newspaper coverage of the trial. I read Denis Herbstein’s “The Porthole Murder Mystery’ and the published transcript of the murder trial of James Camb.

Here was the coincidence. My grandfather was mentioned in the trial transcript. Weird, huh? I was shocked at the time, his very name there in print, being discussed as a ‘known associate’ of Gay Gibson. One witness said they’d seen them having lunch, and that he had written her a reference for a theatrical agent in London, which she took on to the Durban Castle in her handbag.

Coincidence, right?

Or is it. My grandfather  had been born in London’s east end to Hugarian-Jewish immigrant parents. From this modest start he had made himself up, literally, to the degree that nobody quite seems to know the truth. He said he was picked off the streets by philanthropists and educated, that he ran a socialist underground press, that he joined the army and learnt how to box. All of these could well be true, and probably are.  One thing that is true is that all families have and like to weave their stories and myths about themselves - mine possibly more so than others - and one abiding story in my family is that you could walk into any room or, more accurately, any bar in the world with my grandfather, anywhere, anytime, and someone there would look up, smile and say, ‘Hello Mike! Why are you here?’

The second most relevant thing I can think to tell you about my grandfather is that all around his dining-room hung photographs of him posing with Hollywood stars - John Wayne, Bob Hope, Henry Fonda, Mike Silver and Debbie Reynolds, laughing and clutching one another smiling into the camera. See, Zelig. I said to him once, ‘But why are you with them?’ and he shrugged, smiled and winked at me.

By this I don’t mean to suggest he was a charlatan, he wasn’t - he was, to name a few attributes, brilliantly clever, hard-working, politically energetic, insightful, complex, charming and a surprisingly graceful dancer, friend to thousands but, I suspect, known to very few.

So, when I think that my grandfather, who had just arrived from his army post in Israel to run a commercial radio station in Johannesburg, knew Gay Gibson, I just can’t be surprised by this fact.

And because The Finest Type of English Womanhood is also a story of outsiders wanting to belong, but making it up as they go along and trying - in this case, disastrously - to find their place in the world,  it doesn’t seem unlikely or coincidental that my grandfather might have an off the page walk-on part in this tale, indeed it is characteristic that he should.

Puzzling over writing this blog, I looked up ‘Coincidence’ on Wiki and was struck by this quote from Plutarch, ‘It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur’ . If Plutarch had known my grandfather and, you know, there is this tiny, crazy part of me that wouldn’t be entirely boggle-eyed about that either,  he might have added, ‘Especially if Mike Silver were involved.’

So, do we believe in coincidences or not?

P.S. I wore a black dress, with kick ass shoes.

The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath is out now. Buy it from Amazon, Play, Waterstones.com, or from your local bookshop.

Helping you through the other long, dark, tea time of the soul, it’s this week’s Friday Feeling!

We’ve already had totally stylish bookshelves, now here we have some weird and wonderful ways to reuse your old books. The book ball is neat, the book ’scrapbook’ looks like a flower has been sick on it. Oh well!

Stuart Evers argues in this lively blog post that confidence isn’t everything when it comes to good writing. (Largely I agree, though I’d also say that unless you have some confidence that the story you’re telling is worth reading then why would you bother writing it?)

‘The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year’ is a long name for a frequently hilarious prize: you can help vote for the shortlist here. Our very own Hutchinson published a contender in previous years called Knitting With Dog Hair: Better a Sweater from a Dog You Know Than a Sheep You’ll Never Meet. So many questions about that book. So few answers.

What was it like to write Pocket Notebook?

This is something I’m asked with increasing regularity, certainly by colleagues in my ‘real’ job as a serving police officer, colleagues who now look at me - the publication date fast approaching - with a curious mix of wonder, bemusement and no little amusement.

I’d love there to be a brief, snappy soundbite answer. In truth, it’s been a blur.

Try this: imagine working full-time shifts, a minimum fifty-six hour week of morning, afternoon (but they’re really evening) and night shifts. So even before you get to the physical act of writing, imagine feeling permanently jetlagged, like you’re flying to Goa and back ad nauseum, an interminable redeye flight across timelines, your body clock not tick-tocking but jumping around the hours until you’re so tired you could weep. Throw in a Masters degree in Creative Writing with a Critical Study on Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction and his accounts of marginalised individuals.  Add attempting to renovate your decrepit cottage with little or no money, going to night school for Portuguese lessons (don’t ask), attending various writing groups and doing distance learning writing courses just so you can, y’know, get somewhere. Please. And then, just when it’s getting really interesting, ensure your wife gets pregnant. Twice, while you’re struggling with the first draft. I mean, why not? Idle hands and all that.

Against that backdrop you sit, and write, and type. You do it when you can. You do it because you must, because you’re twenty thousand words in now and it’s become a compulsion. This thing - this kernel of an idea you had back in the day, back in 1995 when you were a young man and the tools required to do the idea justice were missing so you put it to one side - it’s gripped you like nothing else. Imagine stumbling home after twelve hours in work, it’s one in the morning, your house is asleep so off you go, losing yourself in the travails of Jacob Smith, potty policeman, the prose pouring out of you, spewing onto the page because - see above - this is the first time in days you’ve had the chance to write and it’s been building inside you, you’ve just got to get it out. And before you know it the sun is bleeding into the room through the blinds, your heavily pregnant wife is at the door, bleary-eyed, holding your toddler daughter, shaking her head. You go to bed, feeling guilty again. You sleep, but wake intermittently to scribble notes. And so it goes…

Then there’s having a character like Jacob in your head. For months upon end. A character whose life is disintegrating, whose clipped, control-freak tones soon dissolve into stream of consciousness ramblings as everything unravels around him, a man who you would cross the street to avoid if you knew him. Imagine preparing to write, your laptop humming away, notes spread across the damp-riddled cloakroom you grandiosely refer to as your study, and to get into the groove you have to pace the kitchen, chain-smoking, working yourself into a frenzy just to match the mindset of the character you’ve created, to be able to write about the crazy things he’s doing with his life. Then picture your one-year-old daughter watching you do this.

So you write, and write, the word count rising, fifty-thousand, sixty, seventy, more. It consumes you, your character taking on a life of his own, his breakdown your breakdown, his experiences yours. It feels like it’s never going to stop. And then - suddenly - you do stop. Everything falls into place. Everything ends. Imagine it: it’s half three in the morning, you’re on paternity leave for your son, you’re supposed to be helping out your wife who gave birth not two weeks before. That guilt again. But that compulsion. The last year, gone. And you type the final line, almost crying with relief. Just as you do, your tired wife appears at the door again. She sees the look on your face and smiles.

It was good to get Jacob, this crazed police juggernaut, out of my head.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. Am I grumbling about all of this? Hell, no. Let’s put it into perspective: my wife, who was also enduring everything I’ve mentioned, quietly, with no fuss, carried and gave birth to two beautiful children while I was hunched over a desk making up a story in La La Land. But this novel, Pocket Notebook, is my own little baby. Now it’s published I feel a tiny bit of that guilt has been assuaged. It’s my thank you to her.

I imagine you reading it now, you who I’ve never met and probably never will. And I’m thrilled. I imagine you experiencing Jacob’s world, travelling with him, shaking your head in disbelief, smiling to yourself - maybe, hopefully, laughing out loud on occasion - as he stumbles onwards.

I imagine you finishing his story and feeling you’ve been on a hell of a ride. Because it is one, for him.

And it still is, for me.

Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas is published today. To order a copy go to rbooks, Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, or find it at your local bookstore.

Watch the trailer here

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.

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?

The first in a series of posts with booky-links and cultural doo-bobs that have been catching our eye this week.

Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone - my shelves filled up long ago, and I’ve resorted to putting books in drawers, under the bed, and of course, that last great bastion of storage places, the floor. This site shows you how good it can be.

The Yellow Wallpaper - one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. A perennial favorite for English Literature students, but breaks into must read territory with an ending at once heartbreaking and terrifying. Maggie O’Farrell’s review is great too.

For the design inclined, here the folks at TCM have given classic films a modern poster design makeover, with ‘I want those on my wall now’ results. The original page isn’t working, but here’s another instead. (There are three pages of that post.)

And finally, if you’ve ever wondered what designers do when they have too much time on their hands, here’s your answer: book/album cover mashups. Obviously!

With me?  Sure?  There are emails to check, then Twitter of course, and Facebook, as well as all those other book blogs. Then the phone’s going off, someone’s left the TV on, there are children/other halves/animals running under your feet. You might resort to sticking on your headphones, but even then you’re just taking them off every two minutes when someone asks you where they left their…whatever.  Just how is a person supposed to get any reading done around here anyway?

I’m not really talking about reading a blog post of course, though I myself struggle to finish 500 words sometimes without one of the distractions listed above drawing me away again.  I’m talking about getting really stuck into a book, particularly a book that demands you pay attention to what is going on, or else you lose the thread entirely.  This is the kind of reading that demands a quiet room and a good couple of hours of your time.

Part of it is the time factor: we all have busy lives, and sometimes taking out time to read can seem positively indulgent when there are so many other jobs to do. After a long day spent reading emails and presentations, my eyes are tired of scanning left to right, and TV or the wireless are much more appealing.  But I’ve also noticed recently that I seem to get virtually all my reading done on the commute to work. How has my reading been squeezed and compressed into this hour or so a day - and not exactly the most relaxed hour either?

The answer is revealing: I don’t have the internet on the bus or tube*. At the risk of this blog becoming off-puttingly self-referential, the internet is a terrible thing for attention. One of my favourite tweets (please tell me if this was you) was from someone who said ‘Why do I think I can ‘finish’ reading the internet in the morning?’ And it’s true: links fly in all directions so that you stumble from one place to the next. Everything is trying to grab your attention, your next click, the next comment and opinion. I’m not saying the internet is evil - I’m neither a hypocrite nor a Luddite - just that we’re losing something important if it’s pushing other, perhaps more coherent, forms of information out.

Living with a set of characters and seeing them develop over time. Emotional investment.  Following an argument from beginning to end. These are all things that the internet cannot give us. They are the USP of books (and, ok, a really good film). There’s a constant struggle going on in the publishing industry, not just between publishers, but with the myriad of other media - film, TV, and now the internet - on what we can persuade other people to spend their limited time doing. It’s always going to be a tough battle, but books have still got plenty of compelling reasons fighting their corner.

*I’m aware of the existence of these things called ‘iPhones’, but quite apart from my natural neophobic tendencies towards gadgetry (surely the first generation of anything will break as a matter of course?), I want to get some space from the internet just occasionally.