The Guardian tells us about the top 10 best underground reads - not books to be read underground but books with underground themes. I love Moonfleet - a proper adventure book about proper smugglers. The list misses out The Highfield Mole (also called Tunnels), which causes a stir two years ago and was incorrectly labelled as the next Harry Potter. My all-time favourite underground read is Doctor Who and the Web Fear - this takes place completely in the London Underground. London has been evacuated because of a deadly suffocating fog and rampaging Yeti-like creatures are on the loose. The Doctor and some soldiers battle evil in the tunnels.
1. Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
Smuggling was practised not only on the Spanish Main but around our sceptr’d Isle. At New Brighton, Merseyside, where my family is from, the privateers salted their booty away beneath the butter-soft sandstone. Moonfleet contains my cri de coeur: “I believe there never was a boy yet who saw a hole in the ground, or a cave in a hill, or much more an underground passage, but longed incontinently to be into it and discover whither it led.”
2. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Jules Verne’s evergreen page-turner is a reminder that the best adventures may be right under our noses, or rather the soles of our feet. The author described the breathtaking feats of underground engineering achieved by the natural world: “a succession of arches appeared before us like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral; here the architects of the Middle Ages might have studied all the forms of that religious architecture which developed from the pointed arch.”
3. The Underground Man by Mick Jackson
A man in Hackney, east London, was recently dubbed the Mole Man for tunnelling under his neighbours’ houses. Mick Jackson’s real-life model for this novel, the fifth Duke of Portland, was a Mole Man born to the ermine (not inappropriately, you may think, as ermine like to burrow.) He created a sunken ballroom under his ducal seat. He insisted that his servants kept a chicken roasting at all hours of the day, and had it brought to him on heated wagons through underground passages. Jackson brilliantly ventriloquises his lordship in this novel, but the truth is unfathomably stranger than fiction.
4. The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar
The history of the London tube, the first underground train network in the world. Dirty, stuffy, run for the benefit of private business rather than the poor bloody passengers – and it was just as bad when it started! Christian Wolmar knows more about the railways than the men who run them – on second thoughts, that’s not quite the compliment it was intended to be.
5. The Lore of the Land by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
Though not confined to the subterranean, this essential gazetteer of folklore is chokka with secret passages, buried treasure and the strange tolling of sunken church bells. The book shows that the same myths recur around the country, including the legend of the plucky violinist who enters a forbidding tunnel. The music suddenly stops and the fiddler’s never heard of again. A veritable Crufts of shaggy dog stories.
6. Haweswater by Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall’s justly praised debut novel is set in the lost village of Mardale in the Lake District. It was so cut off that when anyone died, the body was carried over the fells on a Corpse Road to the nearest graveyard. Mardale finally got its own consecrated plot, but then it was decided to submerge the whole village under Haweswater to create a reservoir. So the dead of Mardale were dug up and taken to join their ancestors. On hot summer days, the dry stone walls of Mardale eerily reappear.
7. The Dig by John Preston
For years, people wondered what was in the extraordinary burrows at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. They were on land owned by the wealthy Edith Pretty. A clairvoyant told her that her late husband wanted the mounds excavated. The task fell not to Tony Robinson and the gadget-toting Time Team but a horny-handed countryman called Basil Brown, who uncovered the remains of an Anglo-Saxon king. Preston’s novel is a deft excavation of the class snobberies surrounding the historic 1930s dig.
8. Selected Caves of Britain and Ireland by Des Marshall & Donald Rust
The Baedeker of the below-ground world, this is a must for cavers, an excellent primer for novices and deliciously gooseflesh-raising for those who haven’t the slightest intention of going anywhere near a pothole. It was my invaluable companion on a descent of Long Churn in the Yorkshire Dales, which was first tamed in 1848 by “J Birkbeck and party” and is described in this Michelin guide to Middle Earth as “a fine though heavily used cave”.
9. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe
“Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars,” wrote Defoe. “The bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stocked with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends.” Knowing that the great Defoe had been there before me enhanced my pleasure in keeping alive the tradition of troglodyte tippling in Nottingham, at a pub called The Trip to Jerusalem which was quarried out of the city’s Castle Rock.
10. The Time Machine by HG Wells
One of the finest works of science fiction set in the subterranean. In the dystopian future imagined by Wells, the Morlocks are a race who lived below ground. In researching my book, I was amazed to find that some of my fellow countrymen have made similar lifestyle choices to the Morlocks. It’s no slight on the good people of Wolverley in the West Midlands to say that they’re cavemen. There, a des res called Rock House was on the market, carved out of a cliff face and a snip at £25,000.
Rubina Ali, child star of the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, is set to publish an autobiography.
Just when you thought it was safe to go to the bookstore…
The Claremont Review - the non-profit Victoria, BC-based literary magazine - has announced the winners of its annual writing contest for young people. The competition - which is sponsored by AbeBooks.com since 2005 - attracted more than 700 submissions of poetry and fiction from dedicated young writers, aged 19 and under, from across North America. We love the folks at the Claremont Review - they’re an incredible group of teachers who love books, literature and creative writing. 
Having met a many authors, I can reveal many are just like you and I. But Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, born 150 years ago today, could never be described as ordinary and there’s a lot more to this writer besides Sherlock Holmes. (For instance, did you know he wrote a book about the existence of fairies?)