Branches, by Philip Ball (Oxford, £14.99)

Why do old city maps resemble the cracking of a ceramic glaze? What links retinal blood vessels with the Paris métro? How does one arm of a snowflake know what the others are doing? And what do the spread of disease, the electricity grid, and the internet have in common? This book, the third in Ball's series on "Nature's Patterns", brings together a dazzling variety of branching motifs, in rivers, bacterial growth, geological fracture, arboreal vascular systems and social networks. With beautiful economy, the author explains the mathematics of fractals, or some of the chemistry of leaf growth; and he complicates usefully the traditional distinction between natural and man-made systems – many of the latter (cities, power grids) were never "designed" all at once but "grew" through more or less haphazard processes of accretion.

This is extremely high-end popular science, with constant reference to the physical business of actual experiments (lots of people, it seems, get to play with mud, or sand and water, in laboratories) and careful disclaimers about modelling assumptions. Ball evinces a rigorous, patient curiosity, with an occasional flourish of authentic style: casually dropping a perfect reference to Sartre, or observing that a Mandelbrot set "erupts across the mathematical plane". Spare a thought, too, for the imaginative scientists who gave the phenomena he explains such vivid names: "finger rafting", "viscous fingering", "braided rivers", and even "invasion percolation" and "correlated percolation", which I confess had me dreaming of newly aggressive or accurate ways to make coffee.

Ghoul Britannia: Notes from a Haunted Isle, by Andrew Martin (Short Books, £12.99)

Deceptively matey and jokey, this book slowly builds a persuasive analysis of the rules and traditions of the super­natural narrative, becoming what you might even call (to give Martin his Propps) a morphology of the ghost-tale. Ghost stories as we know them, he argues, are products of the Enlightenment, an expression of the suspicion that reason has not yet conquered all, which tension is often literalised in the setting: "The MR James stories feature so many academics wrongly assuming they are safe in libraries that it would be tiresome to count them."

Romping through (mainly Victorian) literature and yarns from castles or seaside B&Bs, Martin also makes enjoyable note of some clichés of the form (the weather "is seldom seen to improve when the ghost is in the offing. Rather, it takes a turn for the worse"), and collects chilling "true" tales from his friends, usually over a few pints in a north London pub. Chillingly agreeable.

Simpsons Confidential, by John Ortved (Ebury Press, £12.99)

This backstage, backstabbing "oral history" of The Simpsons (the most successful TV show ever) offers the brutally entertaining spectacle of executives jockeying for retrospective credit and profits, and show creators' friendships melting down over arguments about merchandising royalties. Odd to remember now that when The Simpsons started it was all about Bart ("Deep Deep Trouble"), until the writers realised that "there was more ­comedy gold in Homer", who must now be one of the most beloved fictional characters of the 20th century. The real heroes of the book, of course, are the writers themselves, who got so powerful they could tell their bosses at Fox where to get off. As one says: "Essentially [. . .] you're dealing with a bunch of class clowns. So as soon as someone tells you you can't do something, it becomes even more imperative that you do it. As soon as they say, 'We don't really like the whore gun,' the response is 'Yep – the whore gun's gotta stay.'" Word.