The Kosuke Kindaichi Fan Club

In all honesty, I prefer detectives who treat murder like an elegant puzzle to be solved. For me, the golden age detectives are the greatest of the genre. They were sophisticated figures, usually privileged well-dressed forces of nature who arrived at a location (a country manor for the most part), looked around a crime scene,…

Scream (Music From The Dimension Motion Picture)

This was a high school album on CD that I desperately wanted to own before the credits of the film started to roll. When it comes to music in movies, especially those aimed at young people, no-one did it better than John Hughes. A tastemaker, he wrote characters in his movies that listened to the…

Tickets for Kirkland Ciccone’s Totally True Stories are on sale now!

Tickets for The Book Nook's first live gig *it's me* are now available! It's going to be a brilliant night, and we want it to be a success, so please snatch tickets now. Details are available on The Book Nook's site: https://thebooknookstirling.co.uk/events/ This is my first live event in two years and the first ever…

Resolver by Veruca Salt

The very nature of a break-up album is that of catharsis, that journey the artist takes you on from the first note to the last second with the whole gamut of emotions in-between. The music becomes your guide through some intense feelings. Some of the greatest, most critically acclaimed albums ever recorded have been inspired…

Beaucoup Fish by Underworld

I tried so hard to get away from Trainspotting. It belonged to my brother, my sisters, their friends. Somehow, I felt it couldn't belong to me. I was at Cumbernauld High School, still trying to create myself, work out what I liked and what I didn't like. Now, here's the important detail: what I liked…

Tinderbox by Siouxsie And The Banshees

I always knew where to find new music. Sometimes, that new music came from old bands long since gone. As a teenager in search of a perspective grander than what I saw outside the window of a council house in Cumbernauld, I'd find myself turning to music and books to give me something that wasn't…

The author portrait of Dorian Gray

Every author has to do it. It isn't something we can't avoid, and many of us have tried. Sometimes we might even feel flattered that someone cares enough to need it. You see them online, on posters, in brochures, and of course sometimes even in books. The author portrait. That's the official looking photograph of…

Your New Favourite Band by The Hives

Some bands are too fun to be denied. Fundamentally, for me, there's something really exciting about a cool-as-fuck garage rock band. Their music is a loud racket, the sound of my emotions. These bands look cool with their music playing, just as cool when they stand for photographs. The Donnas. The Cramps. The Kills. Black…

Deadlines and Diets

Chocolate makes my clothes shrink, or so I tell strangers whenever I want to draw attention to the fact I've put on a lot of weight. The thing is, I never minded how I looked. Outside a few little insecurities (snaggle teeth, size ten feet, and hairy hands) I felt fine about my appearance. Until…

She died at a party

My sister died at a party, which felt strangely apt in hindsight. She loved a good party. She sat through lots of bad parties too. If she could have chosen somewhere to die, a party would have been high up on her list. That or a beach in Spain. But death is never ever that…