+++ 26 announces a major new project with the V&A and London Design Festival. Read about 26 Treasures here +++ New recommendations and reviews from 26 members can be found here +++ Should foreign language entries be accepted in D&AD Writing for Design? Read our members' opinions here +++
Jennie Walker Bloomsbury, £5.99 list, or £5.39 on Amazon
This is a delightful gem of a novel. Set over the length of a test match (England vs India), a sinuous little tale about a wife, her dull husband, her only marginally more interesting lover, the au pair who’s stayed forever and a missing stepson, unwinds in both a manner that isn’t – and to a destination that isn’t – predictable. Walker (actually poet Charles Boyle) has a deft ability to sketch characters in a few sentences, and the dialogue is crisp and dreamy at the same time. I tore through the book as fast as, well, Kevin Pietersen in one of his more destructive phases. Rishi Dastidar
Florian Zeller Pushkin Press, £10 list, or £9 on Amazon
In which France’s latest literary wunderkind made his debut, with the sort of roman a clef which would have made Martin Amis rage with jealousy, if the latter did jealousy. Sure it’s overly tricksy, and sex-fixated, and there’s not plot to speak of, but my does he do curlicues of sentences that track an arrogant young man’s descent into obsession, potential murder and the destruction of children’s innocence, which is – trust me – actually funnier than I’ve made that sound. Rishi Dastidar
A bit of fun and nonsense if you have five minutes to spare. The premise is simple... cut and paste some of your copy into an appropriate box on the website, and by the magic of instant linguistic analysis, your style is likened to one of the giants of literature. I've always prided myself in my versatility, but three randomly selected chunks of the totalcontent website had me pigeonholed as James Joyce, Charles Dickens and Elmore Leonard. Ummm. Well at least I’m no Barbera Cartland. Jim Davies
Mohsin Hamid Penguin £7.99 list, or £4.79 on Amazon
Not what you think. In fact I'm not sure the word ‘Islam’ gets mentioned once – the protagonist is a fundamentalist of a different kind. Interesting authorial voice/perspective, thought provoking and very easy and quick to read. Roger Horberry
Any excuse to see Rebecca Horn’s ‘Concert for Anarchy’ and I’m there. A grand piano is suspended upside-down from the ceiling and periodically disgorges all its keys like rattling teeth. Lovely. Other highlights of the Barbican’s Surreal House installation (with an upstairs and a downstairs and extra stairs by Louise Bourgeois) are Jan Svankmajer’s creepy ‘Down to the cellar’ film, Noble + Webster’s ‘Metal Fucking Rats’ and ‘The Wait’ by Ed Kienholz – an installation featuring a dessicated woman and a head made of glass bottles. There’s plenty of inspiring wordplay too, from Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Georges Perec. Fiona Thompson
Cornelia Parker Baltic Gateshead, until 19 September 2010
Any 26ers who’ve recently visited the V&A’s British Galleries for the ’26 Treasures’ project may have noticed Cornelia Parker’s ‘Breathless’ installation suspended above Room 55. A cousin of this work is now on display in the UK for the first time, at the
Baltic in Gateshead. In ‘Perpetual Canon’, 60 flattened brass instruments are suspended in a circle, illuminated by a single bulb. The cornets, trumpets and euphoniums, tubas and giant Sousaphone, are cartoonishly squashed, but the effect is somehow magical. Fiona Thompson
EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED
Wells Tower Granta, £10.99 or £6.58 on Amazon
And here he is, another feted American short story writer, come over here to show us how it is done, this most noble of arts: the shimmering sentences that you want to rip out and turn into poems; the air of humidity and enervation that makes the wisps of plot entirely appropriate; and the thing that really sets this collection apart, the controlled, simmering violence between ill-at-ease protagonists. Damn these yanks, stealing our literary formats etc etc. Rishi Dastidar
Another musical recommendation this month but there's some truth in the saying "all art aspires to the condition of music". The best writing has the ability of music to connect to your emotions - it's what we all strive for, at least much of the time we're writing.
I went to the Royal Festival Hall for the tribute concert for Kate McGarrigle. Kate, a Canadian singer-songwriter, died of cancer in January. She's proof, along with Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and many others that better things come out of Canada than draconian deficit-cutting models for George Osborne to follow. Kate was the centre of an extraordinary musical family - and extended family - including her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, friends Richard Thompson, his ex-wife Linda, their son Teddy, plus Emmy Lou Harris, Nick Cave, Lisa Hannigan, Neil Tennant. They all gathered to sing Kate's songs on a Saturday afternoon in a full-house RFH.
It was wonderful. As emotional and uplifting a concert as I've ever been to. Now I'm listening again to the music of all the performers but you could start with Kate & Anna McGarrigle's French Record. It's just beautiful. John Simmons
PG Wodehouse Arrow, £7.99 list, or £7.19 on Amazon
Every few months I like to top-up on my Wodehouse. He wrote nearly 100 books, so there’s little danger of running out. I graduated from classic Jeeves & Wooster to the Blandings novels, and now I’m dipping into the Mulliner series. Recounted by inimitable raconteur Mr Mulliner, these are tall fireside tales of sprinting bishops, stuttering cousins, sure-fire wagers, and miracle-cure tonics, direct from the snug of Angler’s Rest. However, it’s not so much the subject matter as the style and rhythm of the writing that takes me return to Wodehouse time after time. His sentences ebb and flow like babbling country brooks, always impeccably constructed and easy to follow, yet sometimes half a page long. It makes a welcome change from the machine-gun fire of most commercial copy, and I hope that if I read enough, the knack of crafting such perfectly pitched prose might lodge somewhere in my bonce’s subconscious. Jim Davies
Bill Bryson Harper Press £7.99, or £4.43 on Amazon
Published a couple of years ago but still hugely readable and most entertaining (if you like Bill's chatty but facty style, which I do). The main message is we know next to nothing concrete about Shakespeare, but that hasn't stopped speculation aplenty, some of it downright bizarre. The last chapter's gentle demolition of the various competing claims concerning who really wrote the plays is particularly fine. I don't think I'm giving away the punchline when I reveal it was in fact Shakespeare. Who'd have thought it? Roger Horberry
A recent trip to Paris provided an excuse (as if excuse were needed) to indulge in this collection of all things French. Of course the essays are elegant and erudite and brilliant as you’d expected. But what I hadn’t expected was a) the insight into the life of a writer; or rather writers: Mallarme, Elizabeth David, and of course, Flaubert, of course; b) the passion of it all. Yes it’s a collection of writings about passions, but still – however cold-eyed Barnes is with his subjects, he does not lose his tendresse for them. Rishi Dastidar
A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST
Ian Johnson Houghton Mifflin, £18.99 list, or £14.95 on Amazon
Or, the unexpected consequences of partnering with your enemies’ enemies. Johnson, a Wall Street Journal reporter tells a rattling tale of how elite units of Muslim thinkers and soldiers were recruited by the Nazis to fight the Soviet Union, who were then in turn co-opted by the Americans to fight in the Cold War, an opening which in turn was exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the main drivers of Islamist thought, to form a beachhead in Europe. Blowback is cliché, to be sure, but it’s still eye-opening to see how the decisions taken by spies over 70 years ago still have a frightening relevance to our world today. Rishi Dastidar
Douglas Coupland Penguin Canada, available sencondhand on www.amazon.com for around US$20
Sometimes biographer and subject form a sublime, perfect moment, and this is one of those times. If McLuhan was to have invented his perfect writer, one doubts that he could have done better than sculpt Coupland, with all his hyper-sensitivity to the wrinkles of the information age. And Coupland does his subject proud, explaining the media age prophet’s often complex, contradictory thoughts succinctly, while deploying his usual typographical tricks and hymns to humanity. It’s part of a series of short biographies, published by Penguin, about eminent Canadians, an idea which should cross the Atlantic. Rish Dastidar
GRAPHIC DESIGN: A USER’S MANUAL
Adrian Shaughnessy Laurence King, £19.95 list or £11.68 on Amazon
Clearly this is aimed at the felt tip fairies many of us work with on a regular basis, but mentally swap the words "designer" for "writer" as you read and it's remarkable how much is relevant. Not just "relevant" in fact, more "absolutely bang on the money". I'm a big fan of books that aim to tell it like it really is, and Adrian's latest is no exception. Very highly recommended. Roger Horberry
Natalie Merchant was the singer and main songwriter with Ten Thousand Maniacs, a US band I loved until they split up in the 90s. Natalie then began a solo career and I've enjoyed most of her work since. Now she's released her latest collection of songs called ‘Leave Your Sleep’.
There's so much about this that will appeal to 26 members. The beauty of her voice. The attention given to words. The fact that, spookily, there are 26 songs. And the CD's all packaged with an exquisite booklet that's so much more seductive than a download.
The 26 songs cover a whole range of styles, not surprising as the lyrics are drawn from the work of different poets - EE Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ogden Nash, for example. She wrote the songs for her six-year-old daughter to show that 'her mother tongue is rich with musical rhythms and rhymes'. John Simmons
Nawal el Sa’adawi University of California Press, available used and new on www.amazon.co.uk
I advise you to go to prison,” said Nawal el Sa’adawi at the Free the Word festival this April. “It gives you the power to survive. When the known becomes known, you’re not afraid of it.” Nawal’s strong, warm and funny personality translates clearly on the page in her account of the months she spent in Egypt’s Barrages prison in 1981, detained by Sadat as a political prisoner. Writing was banned. So, surrounded by dirt, clamour and cockroaches, she borrowed an eyeliner pencil from a prostitute, wrote on toilet paper and hid her ‘diary’ inside her hair rollers. Read this book to discover how she survived prison and why the authorities thought her ideas were so dangerous. Fiona Thompson
NETHERLAND
Joseph O’Neill Harper Perennial £7.99 list, or £2.99 on Amazon
At the back of my edition of ‘Netherland’, there’s an interview with the author, where he’s asked about the trouble he had getting this intriguing work published. When you describe it as a novel about the New York cricket scene, told from the point of view of a Dutch ex-pat, you can see why. But actually, it’s a wonderfully original piece about belonging and national identity, as Hans, the protagonist, befriends a group of marginalised immigrants who have a passion for hearing the weekend sound of leather on willow. Separated from his wife and young son, his loneliness allows him to be inexorably drawn into a curious, rather shady world on the other side of the tracks, and through his eyes we get to see a rather different side of post-9/11 New York. Jim Davies
An interesting new site exploring the relationship between literature and technology. 26 Exchanges has already been mentioned as one of the showcase projects. Well worth following and supporting. Nick Asbury
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
David Markson CB Editions, £7.50
Hmm, a 'concept' novel listing the obsessions, afflictions and causes of death of hundreds of artists, writers and composers across the centuries, and weaving it all together into a meditation on art, mortality and the creative spirit. Sounds a barrel of laughs, doesn't it?
I bought it as a bit of a punt, based on my regard for CB Editions, the publisher who brought us (among other things) Elise Valmorbida's The TV President and J.O. Morgan's brilliant narrative poem Natural Mechanical. I'm glad I did. Still not sure if it's a novel, a poem, or as the book itself has it, just a 'read'. But it's funny, thought-provoking, educational and moving. And it explores a new way of writing that feels right for this age. Nick Asbury
Paul Auster Faber & Faber, £7.99 list, or £4.92 on Amazon
The kind of book you'll read in a few hours. Not only because you can, but because you'll want to. Auster can sometimes be a bit cold, seeking to amaze us with his supreme mastery of form. But in this shaggy dog story, told from the point of view of the bedraggled stray Mr Bones, he has us reaching for our hankies. And along the way, he provides an incisive four-legged pen-portrait of modern middle America. Jim Davies
Absorbing talk from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, earlier in the month at the LSE – part of an event that included Professor Richard Sennett and a waggish Sir Howard Davies. Their theme: ‘On Narrative and Ritual’. Rowan grounded his view of narrative in the hard world, and the problems that throws up for us. “Narrative synthesises a whole range of transactions that happen in real time, between real bodies – because we think with matter. But material things are difficult. Material things resist. We start to think when we bump into things. And we construct pictures of the world around those patterns of bumping.... Difficulty is part of human thinking. Something resists, but that resistance also draws us in, invites us, or provokes.” This is why, in his words: “Narrative is a difficult business. There is nothing more difficult than telling someone all about yourself, for example.” However: “Difficulty can give you traction. The perfect human state is not a frictionless, undifferentiated place; a place without resistance… Narrative should not be seen as a way to control conflict. Rather, it is a place in which conflict can play out.” The LSE has added a video of this event
Steve Harrison Prentice Hall, £14.99 or £8.58 on Amazon
Hands-on advice with a pleasingly bullshit-free tone. Veers between the somewhat obvious and the genuinely thought provoking (thankfully more the latter). Although somewhat biased towards agency heads/account people/the DM fraternity there's more then enough writerly advice to make reading it worthwhile. Straight into my top ten books on business comms. Roger Horberry
If you can get tickets, then it’s time to book Meltdown at the Southbank. This is my kind of festival: indoors, decent loos, excellent coffee and cake, by the river, a tube ride away from my bed and assembled by the magnificent Richard Thompson, whose lyrics are dark, subtle and magnificent and whose guitar playing is sublime. If anyone else is going to see the Duckworth Lewis Method or 1000 Years of Popular Song, email and we can meet up for a beer by the Thames. Sarah McCartney
STUFF WE REALLY LIKE
Music
If you don’t ask, you don’t get. I plonked myself down at my desk and said, ‘I need inspiration’. As if by magic, it appeared. Over on another desk lay a book. Its otherwise plain dustjacket bore the Beatles line, ‘Because the world is round, it turns me on’. The subsequent 780-odd pages contain everything the people at Manchester design agency Music like, from swearing and spending money to Ingrid Pitt and 80s electronica, presented with academic tome-like, serif-fonted restraint but brimming with wit and passion. Lord knows how long it took them. Of course, I like that they like a good many of the things I like. Johan Cruyff, Armchair Thriller and Steely Dan’s Aja make me feel I’m in good demographic company. Two more lovely features – it’s delightfully non-alphabetical, but has an index (an index!), and the spine says ‘vol 1’, suggesting there’s more to come. It’s not for sale, but if you ask nicely, Music will let you have one. Like I said at the start... Jan Dekker
THE ACT OF LOVE
Howard Jacobson Vintage, £7.99 list, or £5.15 on Amazon
Not my favourite Howard Jacobson novel, and a lot darker and bleaker than his early romps. Nevertheless this is a minutely observed, expertly written novel brimful of sardonic humour and nifty turn of phrase. It’s the story of antiquarian bookseller Felix Quinn and his extreme efforts to become a cuckold. He believes the pain of jealousy is the only way to feel the true force of love, and slowly-but-surely lures his wife into the arms of hand-picked lover. Archly comic, ultimately tragic, Jacobson reveals the pain and longing of sexual obsession in all its intensity and ridiculousness. Jim Davies
Sir Richard Burton Penguin Classics, £4.99 or £3.64 on Amazon
Currently, I'm traversing the Middle East and North Africa disguised as a Sufi dervish, narrowly avoiding calamity and catastrophe at every turn. I speak figuratively, of course. The physical traveller in this case is Sir Richard Burton. Not he of Pontrhydyfen who married Elizabeth Taylor, but the one who is described memorably by Wikipedia as 'an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat.' If he was alive today he'd probably win Masterchef too. Our mode of transport is 'To the Holy Shrines' (Penguin Great Journeys), and a comprehensively disguised Sir Richard is setting out to become the first Christian to travel to the Muslim shrines at Mecca and Medina. He would probably be killed if discovered, so there's deep tension in this story, along with rollicking adventures in seamy corners of Cairo and aboard anarchic pilgrim boats on the Red Sea. Our audacious writer and hero isn't entirely free of bombast, and he probably wasn't the first westerner to reach those sacred sites, but his report provides us with a rich and rare portrait of the region in the middle of the nineteenth century. In a word, temerarious. Tim Rich
A SHORT RESIDENCE IN SWEDEN & MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
Mary Wollstonecraft & William Godwin Penguin £ 11.99 list, or £8.39 on Amazon
This wonderfully schizophrenic book (introduced and edited by Richard Holmes) features two deeply connected but very different works. A Short Residence in Sweden contains 25 letters Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her ex-lover Gilbert Imlay evoking a trailblazing journey around Scandinavia in the 1790s. She had just spent two years in Paris during the worst excesses of the French Revolution and needed a break. Ostensibly her trip was a kind of Grand Tour, but beneath the vivid accounts of life in Norway, Sweden and Demark lay an ulterior motive. She was on a mission to rescue a failed - and illegal - business venture on behalf of Imlay, whose exploitation of her passion for him long after they had separated drove her to attempted suicide. William Godwin was Mary’s husband, and his devotional and candid portrait in Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ reveals what a radical but vulnerable person she was, and underscores her unshakeable resolve to fight for the rights of women in an age when it was heresy to challenge the patriarchy. William’s account of Mary’s lingering death after the birth of her daughter - Mary Shelley - makes heartbreaking reading. Tom Lynham
Dave Trott LOAF Marketing, £7.99 list, or £7.19 on Amazon
In which the opinionated one holds forth on advertising, creativity and whatever else takes his fancy. Similar in tone and purpose the Paul Arden books, only not quite as good. That's no great criticism though, and there are some real pearls to be found here if you're prepared to look. Certainly worth a flick through. Roger Horberry
This new food quarterly is full of visual treats and shows some deft editorial design touches, not least typography that invites you to read and stay reading, together with a nice line in archive illustrations. But it's the writing that makes this a rather delicious experience. F&K manages to find a niche in a subject area already provided with oodles of coverage in the Sunday glossies and lifestyle mags, not to mention all those foody blogs. In issue two it carries an evocative and entertaining remembrance of the Gasworks restaurant in Fulham, a place offering such a bizarre mixture of service and sleaze that two visits there in the eighties remain seared in my memory. There are also carefully prepared pieces on figurative food (whither the mould?), food photography, Nordic cookbooks and the enigma that is Fernet Branca (it's a drink, not a daytime TV presenter). The piece that really drew me in was Xanthe Clay's appreciation of restaurateur George Perry-Smith and his most notable place, The Hole in the Wall. Despite a rather haphazard approach, George brought saporous international cooking to cabbagey 50s England. Clay brings to life the man, while the excellent reproductions of his menus will have you salivating. Sign up here. Tim Rich
STACK
The magazine is a dying medium, right? Think again… in fact, there’s recently been a real renaissance in smaller, self-published titles, which kick back against the mediocrity of the mainstream in their writing and design. The only trouble is, how do you find out about these cultish publications, and where do you get hold of them? Enter Stack, a great service which scours the world for interesting new titles and sends them straight to your door. There’s an element of lucky dip, but that’s part of the joy of it. To date I’ve sampled Fire & Knives (a beautifully produced magazine which explores the pleasures of food), Manzine (a hilarious lo-fi mag which debunks the stereotypical men’s magazine), and ’Sup (an achingly cool, culture/fashion mag). They have nothing in common apart from their flair and originality – which can’t be a bad thing. You can subscribe to Stack here. Jim Davies
FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
William Dalrymple Flamingo, £9.99 or £6.90 on Amazon
This rich account of a quietly remarkable perambulation sees Dalrymple retrace the steps of two sixth century pilgrims – John Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist. Their pursuit of Christian wisdom took them from the Bosphorus across modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel to Egypt. Along the way they stayed in remote hermitages, monasteries and caves, and recorded the thoughts of those they met, including the powerful pronouncements of pillar-dwelling stylites – the towering intellects of their time. Published in 1998, Dalrymple's journey reveals much about the state of contemporary Christian culture in the east, from the embattled monks of eastern Turkey to the persecuted Copts of Egypt. Lines of continuity and consistency emerge between the major faiths, which makes the violence done between different groups seem both tragic and absurd. Without bravado or fuss, Dalrymple carries us into this contested and dangerous territory. Military roadblocks punctuate the narrative, the photogenically armoured walls of remote monasteries take on a functional quality, and a thick weave of massacres, expulsions, revenge and flight emerges. At the same time, there's great beauty in this book, not least Dalrymple's considered, elegant prose. Tim Rich
A book of bizarre and beautiful alternative systems for scoring music drawn from the work of composers like Stockhausen, Reich and Cage (and about a 100 others). No idea if any of them actually work, but plenty of the illustrations would make great posters. Think of them as sublime examples of aural information design. Would grace any coffee table. Roger Horberry
In which a not-very-disguised Alexis de Tocqueville is thrown together with an itinerant, rebellious printer / spy / mimic / stenographer, and together they set out for the new world. As you might expect from another Carey coupling, the two are rife with oddities galore, to offset their verbal felicities. And yet you get drawn in by the way they come to depend on each other as they sally forth through American adventures, likely and not. And all the while, Carey’s passion for his adopted homeland shines forth. It’s a love letter of a novel; an extremely convoluted one. Rishi Dastidar
Dan Ariely Harper Collins £8.99 or £5.04 on Amazon
A terrible accident led a young Dan Ariely to question how people make assumptions and to pick apart the holes in everyday logic. Now a behavioural economist of international regard, Ariely has collected some of his experiments in Predictably Irrational to show how we make flawed choices all the time - and how we fail to learn from them too. Accessible and easy to understand, always entertaining, always revealing. James Hogwood
A friend sent me an email recently, asking if I wanted to see a three-hour Philip Glass opera about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, sung in ancient Sanskrit. He said he’d be performing “with a motley bunch of assorted misfits creating visual images out of bits of old newspaper, wicker baskets and sticky tape”. How could I resist? The opera is about Gandhi’s concept of non-violent protest, or 'satyagraha', and according to The Times “this show burns with white-hot conviction”. It runs until 26 March and is on at the English National Opera, London WC2. Fiona Thompson
Oliver Postgate Canongate, £16.99 or £10.53 on Amazon
Oliver died last year. Millions of people who'd grown up with his characters, or brought their children up with them, felt terribly sad. But Oliver wouldn't want that. He left behind a joyful legacy of stories and invented worlds where Noggin, the Clangers and Bagpuss lived and still live in films and books. In this memoir, Oliver's charming, idealistic, lovable and a storyteller through and through. Later in life, as artist-in-residence at an Australian university, he sat fuming in an academic lecture: a semiotic analysis of filmmaking. Unable to contain himself any longer, Oliver exploded and raged for the creative instinct. That was Oliver. He was always for things, for life. John Simmons
This list of writing tips from 28 authors appeared in the Review section of The Guardian on 20 February. Most of what we write for clients is fabricated, so it contains useful pointers. Highlights include "Leave out the part that readers tend to skip" (Elmore Leonard), "If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings" (Geoff Dyer) and "Don't drink and write at the same time" (Richard Ford). Tom Lynham
Let’s face it… if you’re a member of 26, the chances are that numbers are not your forté. For me, they’re just confusing marks best left to bookkeepers and accountants. I’m actually beginning to think I suffer from a mild form of number dyslexia, often transposing digits and being perennially useless with PIN numbers and phone numbers. So Word Clock, by the ingenious digital designer Simon Heys (currently working at the Times), is a welcome antidote to the number fascism of time. It’s a rather beautiful screen saver (for Mac, PC or iPhone), which tells you the time in written out words, which change… well… every second. You can set it as a full screen of words or a rather elegant spiral, you can change the colours or the typeface. It’s wonderfully mesmerising watching time click by in words. Get yours here. You won't regret it. Jim Davies
A MAN ON THE MOON: THE VOYAGES OF THE APOLLO ASTRONAUTS
Andrew Chaikin Penguin, £10.99 list, or £7.66 on Amazon
Sure, we know the story. And sure, it’s just all nostalgia now, 40 years on. But whatever angle you look at the whole enterprise from: a heroic extending of man’s capabilities, a tragic waste of money, a scientific springboard or full-stop, one thing can’t be gainsaid: the sheer bloody unlikeliness of it all. That anything that bold, that brave, that impossible, could happen. You pinch yourself when Chaikin reminds you of some of the stats – the billions, the manpower – involved. And you worry that, as a species, our dreams have become more beige. Rishi Dastidar
A real life Spinal Tap, full of unintentionally hilarious moments you just couldn't make up. Oddly the result is somehow wonderfully life affirming. You don't need to like heavy metal to appreciate this brilliant DVD about the trails and tribulations of Canada's least successful rockers - it's all about the humanity, man. Get the beers in and enjoy. Roger Horberry
I can heartily recommend www.futilitycloset.comwww.futilitycloset.com. It’s a marvellous case of curiosities, a cornucopia of trivia, a source of temporary inspiration, and most importantly a daily distraction from the wordface of work. Martin Lee
GHOSTS OF SPAIN
Giles Tremlett Faber & Faber, £9.99 list, or £5.96 on Amazon
Just back from Christmas in Barcelona where I devoured gallons of white Riocha, acres of black chocolate, and this marvellous book. Giles is the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent and brings inspired investigative journalism, a love of listening, and dazzling writing which all adds up to riveting storytelling. He travels on a series of physical and metaphysical journeys to exhume the ghosts that make Spain such an evocative experience. How come Franco still exerts such a subliminal influence? How did the bikini save Spain? What do the Spanish think of sex? How do the Spanish have babies? Why is flamenco so visceral? How has corruption + entrepreneurialism proved such a feisty economic mix? Why did Islamic terrorists bomb Madrid? Why do the Spanish love chancers and rule breakers? Giles is incredibly good on language, and reflects on how dialects feed identities and shape cultures. He writes about the mysteries of Basque (which Susannah Hart explored so eloquently in our book on translation – 26 Exchanges), Basque separatism and the rise and demise of ETA. He struggles with the differences between Catalan and castellano, and discovers how Galego confuses everyone but is alive and well in Galicia. The book concludes with a revealing chapter on Pedro Almodóvar who epitomises Spain’s Transición (from suffocating dictatorship to idiosyncratic democracy) and a national characteristic –not to moralise – but to understand. Tom Lynham
Some of the most beautiful writing I have read from America since William Faulkner.
Two takes on an interconnected story - somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'. Stuart Delves
I haven't been to a meeting yet, but I hear good things about this club, and I see one or two 26ers are members already. Here's the club's self-description: A monthly meet up in a central London venue to swap, give away, recommend and talk about business books. The kind of books that have taught you, motivated you, inspired you, improved your understanding of psychology, sociology or other ologys. Is your hero Seth Godin or Richard Templar? Freakonomics or Wikinomics? Richard Branson or Felix Dennis? Discuss this, and other things (with beer). At every event we have an active conversation with a great author speaker, book swap with other members and network our socks off.' Tim Rich
John Logan Donmar Warehouse, Earlham Street, until 6 February
I love Mark Rothko's work as a painter, it seems spiritual to me. The works I've seen at the Tate Gallery have an emotional effect that I find hard to explain, particularly as they're abstract paintings. I went to see John Logan's play at the Donmar because I love Rothko and it didn't disappoint. I went to see it a second time, and I thought it even better the second time.
There's a repeated refrain as actors and audience stare at a painting on stage: "What do you see?" You might answer "Red". What do you see? What else? There are other colours, particularly if you keep looking. And there are thoughts. There are emotions. And these are powerful.
There are just two people on stage throughout. Alfred Molina as Rothko, Eddie Redmayne as his assistant. You come out closer to Rothko (not necessarily a comfortable place), closer to understanding the depth of his art. It's only on until 6 February - see it if you can. And see some Rothko too. John Simmons
REDEMPTION SONG: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF JOE STRUMMER
Chris Salewicz Harper, £10.99 list or £7.66 on Amazon
Unless you are a dedicated Clash/Strummer fan, 672 pages probably represents more time than you’d care to spend in their company. But if you’re fully sold on the man and the mythology, this book is satisfyingly exhaustive. Chris Salewicz (the rock journalist and biographer who Strummer insisted on calling ‘Sandwich’) is a fair and generous chronicler, giving us a warts-and-all account of his friend, easily the most articulate voice to emerge from the Punk movement. 'Redemption Song' is nicely balanced and written in an easy-going style, a portrait of the age as well as the main protagonist. Strummer comes across as a complex man battling coming to terms with many contradictions – infuriating, pig-headed and selfish, yet driven, inspired and generous. In 2002, soon after his 50th birthday, Joe died of a heart attack doing nothing more taxing than sitting on the sofa reading the Guardian. Jim Davies
Charlie Brooker Faber & Faber, list £12.99, or £5.35 on Amazon
If you're a Guardian reader or you've watched any of his TV series then you'll already have the measure of misanthrope Brooker's musings, but that doesn't stop them being any less entertaining. Someone make him king, please. Roger Horberry
Edward Gorey Bloomsbury, £5.99 list, or £4.14 on Amazon
There’s something about this poignant tale of writer’s block from 1953 that seems particularly appropriate for a January. Written and illustrated by the gorgeously bonkers Edward Gorey, this is the tale of Mr Earbrass, and the struggle to write his new novel, ‘The Unstrung Harp’. Mr Earbrass is described as a ‘straying’ rather than a ‘sedentary’ type of author, and – like every writer - is endlessly distracted from his work by biscuits, cups of tea and the desire for forced greengages. If you’re suffering from January, withered verbs or adjectives that are proliferating past control, this book is a tonic. Fiona Thompson
Eric is design director for The O Group and a professor at The School of Visual Arts, New York. He's also a prolific and imaginative collector of books and graphic ephemera. Every week or so he publishes an eclectic sample of images via the Design Observer blog. His mini-collections – or recollections – invite your mind to hopscotch across history. You might see an achingly beautiful modernist book jacket, a bizarre family photo, portraits of cheese, a circus poster, a business card, a fragment of poem, a government warning... Each montage opens new windows on yesterday, and every so often you find yourself leaping through a window in pursuit of an intriguing typeface, a forgotten trade show, the ghost of an author, a frightening piece of footwear... Tim Rich
CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART
Bob Dylan Columbia £8.98 on Amazon
A work of reverence, love and good cheer in the same old-school spirit as his Theme Time Radio Hour. Dylan's voice alternately brings to mind an old priest belting it out as he leads the congregation, a misty-eyed tramp outside the church singing along, or a magical cross between Louis Armstrong and Shane MacGowan (can you think of a better thing?). Set against the backdrop of beautifully realised musical arrangements (with a lightness of touch that has become a forgotten art form in most of the music business), the contrast is perfect.
The cynical reaction this has received from some corners of the press (chuckling on the Today Programme, and sneers from, erm, Jeremy Clarkson) shows what a strange musical climate we live in. In a world where mediocrity is routinely celebrated as genius, this is a reminder of what music is meant to be about – a communal gift that connects us all to a greater tradition. Forget it's Dylan and put it on while you're passing round the port – you'll love it. Nick Asbury
I wanted to recommend something traditionally Christmassy – something with snow, ice and existentialism – and you can't beat Werner Herzog's absorbing documentary for that. The film spends time with some of the 1,000 people who work on Antarctica; a crew of red-anorak'd scientists, divers, pilots, survival experts, cooks and industrial workers, each of whom has a cute sideline in something unexpected (philosophy, poetry, bad rock guitar, Aztec royalty). Nothing quite prepares you for the underwater dive scenes, where the ice becomes a sky and seals provide a Moogy soundtrack like out-takes from an early Eno album. There's a sense that many of the talented misfits working here have slowly wandered to the end of a global cul-de-sac, as if it were a refuge from metropolitan civilisation. Herzog's subjects perform quietly peculiar scenes, like the taciturn penguinologist who struggles to respond to the film maker's curiosity about animal mental health. Or the vulcanologist who, perched on the rim of the caldera, briefs Herzog on the counter intuitive safety dance he must do when (not if) the volcano spits up a lava bomb. Walking down the volcano, they decide to explore a fumarole, a complex ice cave formed by venting steam. Each subterranean ice cathedral they find hints at an epiphany never to be fully grasped. Very seasonal. Tim Rich
FEED YOUR MIND - A GREAT BRITISH MISCELLANY. ROYAL MAIL SPECIAL STAMPS 2009
Jim Davies Royal Mail, £65. From larger Post Offices or www.royalmail.com
Well, if I don’t tell you about it, no one else will. I spent a large proportion of 2009 working on the Royal Mail Yearbook. It’s a handsome, limited-edition, slip-cased book which comes out towards the end of every November and contains all the stamps published during the course of the year. I was charged with telling the stories behind the stamps, which meant researching everything from Charles Darwin to Mythical Creatures, the Tudors to the Fire & Rescue Service. Oddly enough, this is the 26th Yearbook – and the fifth I’ve written. The usual format is long, running essays, but this year the designers, hat-trick, decided to ring the changes with a more lateral, ‘bite-sized’ approach, which meant dipping into obscure nooks and crannies around the central subject. It was a huge effort, but it’s paid off handsomely – it’s quirky, dippable and interesting. Kind of like QI in print. You can get hold of a copy here. If you’re baulking at the price, remember the stamps inside are worth nearly £50. Jim Davies
IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS AND PERSONAL PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF LENORE DOOLAN AND HAROLD MORRIS, INCLUDING BOOKS, STREET FASHION AND JEWELRY
Leanne Shapton Bloomsbury, £12.99 or £7.06 on Amazon
So yes it’s an auction catalogue. But it’s not just an auction catalogue. It’s a litany of what were’s, what might have beens, what should have beens, memories, days, nights, the past, the future. And a meditation on how objects filled with dreams and hopes can turn out to disappoint you in the end. Sounds like a novel right? Don’t forget, it’s just an auction catalogue… Rishi Dastidar
This fascinating book explores what happens when a man unilaterally decides that he and his 13 year old son need to live in a wooden hut on an island in the wilds of Alaska for a year. In real life, David Vann’s father killed himself, and in this book, he fictionalises the story, splintered through various points of view. They fish, they hike, they store food for the winter, and in the background there’s a sense of impending tragedy as the father gradually loses his mind. It’s cleverly written and Annie Proulx fans will love the sparse language and harsh environment. Fiona Thompson
POSTSECRET: EXTRAORDINARY CONFESSIONS FROM ORDINARY LIVES
Frank Warren Orion, £9.99 or £6.32 on Amazon
Not the boxing promoter. An amazing book in which anonymous volunteers share personal secrets by way of homemade postcards. Intense, confessional, voyeuristic, enthralling and at time heartbreaking. Practically every postcard is a potential screenplay. Roger Horberry
This exquisitely spiteful exhibit of words, images and movies is served up with lashings of REVENGE! It premieres the English language version of Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), a highlight of the 2007 Venice Biennale. Sophie invited 107 women (including a sexologist, a cartoonist, a proofreader, a romance writer, a screenwriter, a chess player…) to use their professional skills to interpret an ‘IT’S OVER’ email from her partner. The show is an incisive post mortem on The Death of the Relationship, and the saccharine language that reveals deeply submerged poisons. I went with a chum who had just spilt up with her boyfriend, and we cringed at the phraseology of irreconcilability knowing that similar drivel had come out of our mouths. The book of the show is a glorious dollop of graphic design with inserts, documents, original texts, copy corrections, DVDs and mesmerizing portraits of the women who contributed. The perfect Christmas gift for your loved one? Tom Lynham
THE BEST TECHNOLOGY WRITING 2009
Steven Johnson (Ed) Yale, £14.00 or £11.02 on Amazon
An American traditional that hasn’t yet made it’s way over the water is the one where a number of literary eminences are invited to select their favourite pieces of writing of the year gone by, to be anthologised, both as a record of important pieces, and a nudge towards things you might have missed. Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, has made a fine selection of essays from publications both on- and offline, which fulfil those first two criteria, as well as providing a snapshot of various debates in and around the technology community – and how it is impacting upon wider society. No doubt you’ll have read some of these already. But the book is a good way to get up to speed with some topics that will become ever-more important next year. Rishi Dastidar
Richard’s philosophical toolbox of arguments around craftsmanship explores the distinctions between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory. In an age of carnivorous competition, he suggests that survival of the fittest leaves a lot to be desired in comparison to the resounding values of craft. Writing is a formidable mixture of craft and intellect. We not only interrogate the content of a sentence to justify its existence, but then tweak the living daylights out of it to make the reader purr with pleasure. Richard analyses an incredibly diverse range of subjects – from the National Health Service to Stradivarius to Diderot to Elizabeth David to Linux, and explores our fundamental relationship between eye, hand, emotion and ambition, and that relentless obsession to create. Tom Lynham
This may seem like a ridiculous recommendation, but what the hell, indulge me, it’s Christmas, for I’m giving a maniacal recommendation for Wuthering Heights. Having just re-read it to support our 18 year-old’s A levels, I’m chastened by the reminder of how supremely transcendent the truly great works of literature are. Utterly majestic. Go on, put aside those Booker Prize runners-up and reach out for the greats this yuletide... Martin Lee
Robert Bolano & Stieg Larsson Quercus, £3.95 & Picador, £4.92, both on Amazon
I've been much occupied by two books in the past three months.
The first, 2666 by Robert Bolano, is an enormous doorstop of a literary novel - 900 pages, translated from spanish, five separate but connected novels crammed into one. A pattern that's almost visible, a puzzle that's tantalisingly in reach. A long slow difficult read but rewarding. "A masterpiece" proclaims the cover...
A marathon of a book compared to the 400 metre sprint that is ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg Larsson. If the first took me more than two months to read, the second took me less than two weeks and I found myself reading it at every opportunity. A gripping thriller with unusual characters and constant plot surprises, and much better written than, say, Dan Brown.
Both authors were about 50 when they died recently - but they have other books if you decide you want more. I'll be reading my way, at a sprint, through the Larsson Millennium trilogy. John Simmons
Humphrey Hawksley Macmillan, £12.99 list, or £6.47 on Amazon
Many of us have grown up with the truism that democracy is the preferable form of government in our time. For some, democracy is synonymous with progress. Or as Churchill put it, ‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried’. In this new book, BBC World Affairs correspondent Humphrey Hawksley questions this simplistic notion, speaking to people around the world about their views on politics, power and representation. While some would forego essentials to maintain their precious vote, others say they would trade it for security, water or electricity. How should we respond to evidence that attempts to democratise often go hand-in-hand with increasing internal conflict? Do events in Afghanistan reveal the tough realities of the road to democratic freedom or the results of imposing the wrong form of government on a country? Would you choose to live and vote in Haiti rather than authoritarian Cuba? This is a well-considered, cosmopolitan rumination on complex but vital matters. Tim Rich
Lucy Prebble Royal Court Theatre / Noel Coward Theatre
Enron filed for bankruptcy in late 2001. Little did we know at the time that it was the canary in the economic coal mine, and that its pioneering model of off-balance sheet investing, opacity and hubris was being built upon and expanded by investment banks around the world. Lucy Prebble and director Rupert Goold have brought life to what could be a dry tale by making vivid both the arcane accounting terminology and the egos at the hear of the company. And when I say vivid, be prepared for lizards, Siamese twins and mice, amongst other things. It’ll be our generation’s ‘Serious Money’, it really will. Rishi Dastidar
H V Morton Methuen, £9.99 list, or £6.95 on Amazon
Some months ago I wrote about In ‘Search of Scotland’. Well, this time the intrepid H.V. goes forth in post-Blitz London, and a rather poignant read it makes. It's the human interest and emotional resonance behind the big events that makes this so readable (and touching). Think of it as a sort of benign psychogeography 40 years ahead of Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd etc. A great book for anyone fascinated by London. Roger Horberry
Alan Bennett National Theatre, London until March 2010
Wry asides? Check. A delicious campness? Check. A belief in the transformative power of creation? Check. And yet, and yet… this is not Alan Bennett as we might think we know him through his cuddly ‘National Treasure’ persona. This is an a times dark look at both great men – WH Auden and Benjamin Britten in particular – and the way in which their gifts, talents and appetites can warp them. Not to mention ruminations on the theatre and the sacrifices that writing takes too. You’ll laugh lots. But you’ll be thinking while you do. Rishi Dastidar
Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 The National Gallery, London, until 24 January 2010
Went to see Damien Hirst at the Wallace Collection the other day, followed by this exhibition of 17th century Spanish paintings and sculptures at the National Gallery. No contest. The National Gallery wins hands down. The sculptures are extraordinary, even if you’re not religiously inclined. Dramatically lit, it’s like a meditation, going from these lifelike sculptures to powerful paintings by de Ribera and Velázquez. Room 3 is particularly striking, where you’re surrounded by St Francis, from Zurbarán’s soulful pictures to a sculpture that belongs in Toledo Cathedral and has left it for the first time for this exhibition. Fiona Thompson
A SINGLE MAN
Tom Ford (Director)
You might have to wait a wee while to see it, but it’ll be worth it, promise, he says, cranking up the hype machine. Ford’s debut film is an elegant (obviously) and stylish (natch) adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel about a gay Englishman coming to terms with the death of his lover. It’ll make you wonder a) what Ford was doing messing around with clothes for so long, and b) about the quiet way he brings the best out of his actors. It’s handsome, controlled, sleek and devastating – as is its core, Colin Firth. The Best Actor Oscar bandwagon starts here. Rishi Dastidar
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Eric Maria Remarque Vintage £7.99 or £5.49 on Amazon
Almost daily as I was reading this book, television newsreels showed Union Jack draped coffins being off-loaded at RAF airports. Published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front reflected Remarque’s experiences as a German soldier in the First World War. It is still a visceral condemnation of young people sent to meaningless slaughter by those in pursuit of political objectives. This book’s power comes from its humdrum observation. There is no Gung-Ho. No Heroics. No Glory. No God Is On Our Side. The impact of atrocity on human life is reported with surreal glimpses of Mother Nature’s belligerent beauty in the killing fields of Flanders. This excerpt describes the vulnerability of youngsters plucked from villages and hamlets all over Germany, given a gun, and thrown into battle. 'You get a lump in your throat when you see them, the way they go over, and run, and drop. You want to thrash them for being so stupid, and pick them up and take them away from here, away from this place where they don’t belong. They are wearing battle dress trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is too big and flaps about, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; there weren’t any uniforms in these children’s sizes.' The Army Recruitment office in my local shopping centre is as slick as a fashion boutique. No hair shirt serge or other people’s underpants here. It has all the plasticity of a Philippe Starck television game show complete with camouflage drapes, designer sunglasses, Ron Arad chairs, virtual war play stations, and grinning chicks and dudes lingering in the doorway fishing for kids. Tom Lynham
George MacDonald Fraser HarperCollins, £7.99 or £5.48 on Amazon
More romping nonsense from the cowardly villain of "Tom Brown's Schooldays". As the title suggests, this volume sees Flashman becoming the hapless hero of the Charge of the Light Brigade and somehow saving India for Britain. What's great about these books - apart from all the rogering and carousing - is the casual learning abundantly evident in the background. That's my excuse. Roger Horberry
What do these remarkable images of glaciers have to do with business writing? Not much, which is why they're my current favourite accompaniment to a mind-refreshing, mid-draft cup of tea. Having said that, the extended captions are rather fine. Tim Rich
HOME TIME
BBC2, Thursdays, 10pm
How about this for a line? “30? I’m not 30. I don’t measure age in years, I measure it in achievements. That makes me about 14.” Watch Home Time on BBC2, Thursday evenings at 10. Sarah McCartney
MY TRADE: A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH JOURNALISM
Andrew Marr Pan, £8.99 or £6.48 on Amazon
No doubt we’ll be swamped by Marr-mania in the coming weeks, as his history of slightly-less-modern Britain hits the shelves and screens, but his earlier memoir-cum-account of the rise of British journalism and his small part in it is well worth seeking out. While it doesn’t replace more comprehensive histories, the gossipy personal anecdotes flesh out his narrative – and his explanations of how political journalism and editing work are lucid and revelatory. Rishi Dastidar
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 is Herta Muller for her "concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Read abouther struggles writing during the Romanian dictatorship, and her ongoing experience of Securitate terror, which is still alive and kicking twenty years after Ceausescu's execution. Tom Lynham
OFF WITH HIS HEAD (THE NGAIO MARSH COLLECTION)
Ngaio Marsh Harper £9.99 or £6.39 on Amazon
There are some new editions of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn murder mysteries out. Three novels in each edition. Oh joy. I do read 21st century books, honest I do, but for sheer pleasure I love to read inter-war literature, particularly with the occasional unpleasant death and intelligent detective thrown in. I was distraught when I finished everything Marjory Allingham wrote; I ran out of Edmund Crispin and then I bumped into Marsh. Sheer verbal beauty with no superfluous decoration. Sarah McCartney
Paul Kingsnorth Portobello, £7.99 or £5.58 on Amazon
This is a very powerful book. Subtitled The Battle against the Bland, this is a polemical cri de coeur about the way that England, although for England read the UK, is being increasingly homogenised through a collection of commercial and bureaucratic forces.
The story is told through a series of case studies, making heroes of a sequence of individuals (boatmen, orchard growers, market stall holders, pub owners etc) who have all refused to buckle to conglomerate power. Inevitably, a lot of the book feels quite gloomy, but fortunately Kingsnorth is sensitive to the danger of it looking like a whinger’s charter (‘it was all so much better in the old days...’) and wherever possible, the book adopts a celebratory rather than accusatory tone.
In fact, he isn’t a type of romantic traditionalist entirely – he recognises that the world doesn’t stand still, but is looking for a way forward that has space for breadth and personality, rather than having all the traditional richness of the country stripped away. I recommend this book as much for the writing as the message – it’s engaging, poetic and hugely readable. Martin Lee
When she was 18, Rosanne Cash preferred rock music to the Country and Western her father was famous for. In fact Johnny was so alarmed that he gave her a list of the “100 Essential Country Songs” and told her that it was her education and she should learn them all.
Well, she did learn to play the songs and finally in 2009, after surgery on a benign brain condition, she cut 12 of ‘The List’ her father passed down to her.
This is a wonderful collection and I’m sure Johnny would approve of this understated album of songs. Recording with her are artists such as Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and Rufus Wainwright. John Fountain
Charles Saatchi Phaidon, £5.95 list, or £4.16 on Amazon
In which noted spouse of Nigella, Adland demi-god and recluse deigns to answer questions, pertinent and impertinent, about himself, his career, his collecting and his life in general. Of course it’s egocentric and maddening. But it’s also witty, self-deprecating and playfully explains what appears an to be an under-acknowledged part of his role in the art market: bringing it to more people. Rishi Dastidar
Professor Richard Wiseman Macmillan, £12.99 list, or £5.84 on Amazon
This book provides a fascinating and wonderful insight into the psychology that works behind the 'self-help' genre. Taking the big themes – and sometimes the little ones – Richard Wiseman looks at what really makes a difference. Based on real psychological research and experiments, he picks out the things you can do to change habits, become happier, become more creative, make the right decision every time, and be more motivated. And every activity takes you 59 seconds or less. An easy read as much for the psychologists among us than those looking for answers: but, I have to say, I will be trying some of them! Anna Goswell
DANCING IN THE STREET: A HISTORY OF COLLECTIVE JOY
Barbara Ehrenreich Granta, £8.99 list, or £6.74 from Amazon
Once upon a time we knew how to enjoy ourselves – feasting, jigging, reeling and rogering at the drop of a hat. But wouldn't you just know it? Those pesky religious types – and you know who you are, St Paul – had to rain on everyone's parade. And that's before sour-puss Calvin came along to really ruin things. A fascinating and highly readable book that's far more scholarly and thought provoking than the above nonsense suggests. The story of how Dionysus was quietly turned into the Devil is worth the ticket price alone. Roger Horberry
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
I’d always meant to read Marquez, but somehow never got round to it. Now I know what I’ve been missing. Full of character and characters, ‘Love In The Time of Cholera’ is a lesson in richly textured storytelling, covering all the big themes – love, sex, death, ageing, friendship – with remarkable insight and compassion. It’s also desperately funny in parts, laying bare the quirks and eccentricities that make us who and what we are. Set in an unnamed Caribbean port city at the turn of the 20th century, Marquez successfully creates a compelling fictional world, which once you’ve entered you don’t want to leave. Jim Davies
James Lever Fourth Estate, £7.99 list, or £4.39 on Amazon
If you have a fondness for old Hollywood and high-grade bitching, then this ‘autobiography’ will be perfect for you. Cheeta, the co-star of umpteen Tarzan movies, has finally put paw to pen and paper – and what a story! From his discovery in Africa, through to his early exploits in New York and then his big break on the Silver Screen, followed by the wildnerness years and his re-invention as a conceptual artist, this is a tale of style, charm grace and very few bananas. Monkeys might not have got round to Shakespeare yet, but they’ve clearly got the celebrity memoir cracked. Rishi Dastidar
An article about a ball and chain discovered in the Thames encouraged me to visit the Museum of London in Docklands. It’s a fascinating place. Housed in a Georgian warehouse at West India Quay, it depicts the history of London as a port. I didn’t know that once the Roman Empire had fallen, the Anglo Saxons set up a new city centre around Covent Garden. There’s a great model of the original London Bridge, looking like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, heart-rending accounts of slavery, and fascinating stories of smuggling and ships queuing for months to get into harbour. Well worth a visit. Fiona Thompson
A single, book-length poem telling the story of Rocky, a dyslexic boy who grows up on the Isle of Skye, dropping out of school and learning his lessons from the land. Sounds old-fashioned and Wordsworthian when you sum it up like that, but it’s an amazingly fresh, assured piece of work, full of memorable episodes, all beautifully told. On a first reading, you can enjoy it purely as a great story (perfect for film adaptation). But then you can revisit it time and again just to savour the music of the language. Best thing I've read in a long while. Nick Asbury
As Ian Dury once observed (about Steely Dan), ‘there’s people who’ve read books and there’s people who ain’t read books’. Jonathan Meades has quite unashamedly read books. More importantly, he’s managed to smuggle his personal brand of mischievous erudition into the increasingly book-free milieu of mainstream TV. Not just once, but around 50 times since the early 90s. How? Well, being funny (if a bit pompous for some) and entertaining and having an insatiable appetite for the surreal all help. This 14-programme sample – the rest are on Youtube - includes last year’s epic Magnetic North and takes in Meades’s architectural and cultural musings on Belgium, the Fens and fast food among other things. A great way of doing your brain a favour. Jan Dekker
Paul Auster Faber & Faber, £8 list, or £4.80 on Amazon
On the surface, these are three short detective stories set in the Big Apple. But they’re really an intricate, self-conscious exercise in overlapping plots and red herrings, and a fascinating exploration of the nature of identity and the writer’s role in storytelling. Written in a sparse, simple style, Auster never dazzles with words, but rather in the amazing dexterity which he weaves the many lines of narrative. The twists and turns can leave you feeling bewildered as well as rewarded, and – if you didn’t think so already – that being a decent writer requires a soupcon of madness. Look out for a great cover by designer/illustrator Jonathan Grey on the Faber Firsts edition – he also did the ‘Common Ground’ cover for 26. Jim Davies
Lawrence and Lorne Blair Available on DVD from Wisdom Books, £38.99
This is a remarkable documentary odyssey through Indonesia, shot by brothers Lawrence and Lorne Blair in the 1960s. They travel through islands rarely visited and document astounding sights, customs, rituals and characters. Forty years on, we've grown accustomed to white-bloke-canoes-up-river-into-jungle travelogues, but this is something much earlier, much more adventurous, much more dramatic, and, at times, much more brutal. The Blairs sometimes leave important questions or developments unresolved, which can be frustrating, but what they reveal more than compensates. You can see the five parts of this film for free online at documentary-film.net, and there are some clips here. Watch out for the man-eating dragons. Tim Rich
AN EQUAL MUSIC
Vikram Seth Phoenix, £7.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
Michael is second violinist in the Maggiore Quartet. He squabbles with his quartet over Schubert and Bach, worries about no longer having the loan of his beloved Tononi violin and is haunted by Julia, the woman he loved and left ten years earlier in Vienna. When Julia suddenly reappears on the top deck of the no.94 bus, the story takes us from London to Vienna, and Venice to Rochdale, giving some fascinating insights into musicians’ passion for their instruments and music, and the bitchiness and in-fighting of life in a quartet. Fiona Thompson
Lots of indie singers and bands performing in the back of London black taxis. Dip into it, including those you've never heard of. Personal favourites are Grizzly Bear and Richard Thompson. John Simmons
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
Haruki Marukami Vintage Books, from £2.80 on Amazon
Knock-out and an inspiration for anyone interested in the genre. Stuart Delves
My friend Ray recently gave me a copy of this, which he writes and edits. The figures make for interesting reading, but it's Ray's delicious amuse-bouche profiles of authors I'd never heard of that have made this my evening reading for the last two nights. I've been introduced to the likes of Christopher Bush and his sixty-three novels featuring urbane investigator Ludovic Travers, and Scottish metaphysical writer David Lindsay and his epic 'Voyage to Arcturus'. I've now been alerted to the controversial Hubert Crackanthorpe, not to mention Barbara Pym, who was described as 'the most underrated writer of the 20th century' by Philip Larkin and David Cecil in the Times Literary Supplement. There are many more, and you'll find 1,000 reproductions of some fabulous first edition book jackets throughout, together with useful appendices on prize winners (Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel) and authors' pseudonyms (did you know Oscar Wilde sometimes used the name C.3.3.?). Tim Rich
The whole of human life is here, plus a lot more besides. From G K Chesterton: "The past is not what is was", to Napoleon: "Men are led by trifles", to 26's very own Jack Gardner: "If it is gone and you are alive, you didn't need it." Tom Lynham
HELLFIRE: THE JERRY LEE LEWIS STORY
Nick Tosches Penguin, £10.99 or £6.59 on Amazon
Part of Penguin’s collaboration with the Magnum picture agency, this biography of ‘The Killer’ is at once heart-gripping, head-spinning, eye-popping and soul-gouguing; a story of biblical proportions told in a suitably epic style, a rollercoaster of rock and redemption. Rishi Dastidar
HV, as his chums called him, was a journalist and travel writer busy in the early to mid 20thC. This book, first published in 1929 and still in print, is an utterly charming tour around Scotland undertaken in the then new-fangled Bullnosed Morris. HV's style is florid to say the least but his turn of phrase is fabulous - for example, describing a Motherwell steelworks as "a volcano under control". Superb holiday reading. Roger Horberry
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Profile Books, £20, or £11 on Amazon
If you work with a multi-millionaire perfumer and “Bubble Bath Baron”, it’s as well to know your stuff. That was just an excuse though. The reason I found myself working in a cloud of perfume is because I already loved fragrances. Turin and Sanchez’s book is full of magnificently opinionated writing about 1500 perfumes; even if you don’t care two sniffs about scent you’ve got to love people who write about a Prada men’s fragrance, “A studiedly dull, nondescript masculine, a medley of every drone cliché in recent years.” If you do have a scent obsession, you can’t help rating your own taste against their five star system. Sarah McCartney
A month about music, or at least sound. Go and "play the building" at the Roundhouse in London. David Byrne, wonderful singer/artist/writer from Talking Heads, has come up with an extraordinary sound installation. You sit at an organ and the building responds to your pressing of the organ with a variety of sounds. I wrote more about it here. David Byrne's latest book Bicycle Diaries is also just out, published by Faber & Faber. I'm looking forward to reading it. John Simmons
PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS
TS Eliot Faber, £4.99 or £3.22 on Amazon
You all know it. You’ve all read it. So all I will say that this very slim volume fits perfectly in your pocket, and is an ideal companion for any urban explorations you might be making, especially at those junctions when refreshment might be needed. Rishi Dastidar
William Fiennes Picador, £14.99 or £8.24 on Amazon
By William Fiennes, whose event I chaired recently at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The story of his childhood in a 14th century moated castle with an epileptic older brother, it's the most beautiful book I've read for a long time. Worth reading just for the metaphors and imagery: cannonballs are messages from gravity; a tuning fork captures the note that's already present in the room. Touching and lyrical, full of insight, human and scientific, it's a feast for anyone who loves good writing. Jamie Jauncey
The second time I went to see Walking In my Mind at the Hayward Gallery, I bumped into Tom Lynham, fellow 26er, who'd heard so many good things about it, he had to come too. It’s on until 6 September so run there now, RUN! Sarah McCartney
MELTDOWN: THE END OF THE AGE OF GREED
Paul Mason Verso, £7.99 list, or £5.59 on Amazon
Mason is 'BBC Newsnight's' economics editor and one of the most cogent, far-thinking and incisive writers on business I've read. 'Meltdown' was written as the financial crisis unfolded, and it reads both as a cold eye on the fundamental flaws in the global capital markets and an on-the-spot report detailing the hot-blooded wrestling that has taken place in government offices and corporate boardrooms. The roots of the current crisis are complex, but it's disappointing that so many business writers (and business people) have collapsed into intellectual nihilism in response. It's not impossible to understand what structured investment vehicles are, and why they're affecting almost all of us in some way right now. Mason not only explains what went on, he also provides a view on what is going on, and what it might mean for the future of business, finance, workers, international relations and the world. This book is a rare example of business writing that combines clarity, sophistication and personal perspective, but it's also an invaluable hint of business issues to come. Essential reading for anyone involved in business communications.
Cornerhouse, Manchester until 30 August. Free admission.
Remember processions? Proper processions where a whole town gets together and expresses itself through the medium of floats, steel bands and crap homemade costumes? Artist Jeremy Deller recently revived the tradition as part of the Manchester International Festival. You’ve missed the procession itself, but there’s a great exhibition documenting the event at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. Nicely done and strangely touching. Steel bands playing Joy Division. Brass bands playing Hit The North. Banners reading “We miss the World of Twist” and “Unrepentant smokers”. Well worth a look. Nick Asbury
Ammon Shea Allen Lane, £12.99 list, or £8.44 on Amazon
Subtitled ‘One man, one year, 21,730 pages’, this is one of those gloriously eccentric books that could hardly have been targeted more directly at 26ers. Ammon Shea, a word lover from the moment he could learn to read, decided to set himself the ultimate challenge. Read the OED in one year, so we don’t have to. Organised into, yes you’ve guessed it, 26 chapters, each letter starts with a mini-essay, sometimes to do with his odyssey, his autobiography or some other related subject (the history of dictionary making for instance) before moving onto the words from each letter that have most piqued his interest, such as finigugal or desiderium. No, sorry, no definitions here, you’ll just have to go out and buy it. But you won’t regret it. Martin Lee
David Eagleman Canongate Books, £9.99 list or £6.99 on Amazon
This brilliant book by neuroscientist David Eagleman offers 40 different scenarios of the afterlife. In the first example, you relive your life with all similar activities grouped together, so you spend 30 years sleeping, 200 days showering and 15 months looking for lost items. In another scenario, you meet all the various possible parallel versions of yourself – both more and less successful. Each chapter makes your brain spin off in a different direction and, ultimately, the book confirms the vast potential of human existence in a very life-affirming way. Clever design by Pentagram, too. Fiona Thompson
The Pencil Museum is very popular on a rainy morning in Keswick. But what lifted my heart was a tiny gift shop selling words called Temporary Measure. It was the vintage pictures on canvases, bags and accessories that invited me in – and the captions that had me pottering about until I almost missed my bus. Lydia Thornley
THE WINDING STICK
Elise Valmorbida Two Ravens Press, £9.99 list, or £7.49 on Amazon
I don't know about you, but I always find it awkward when an acquaintance asks you to read their book/listen to their record/see their show. The fear is it'll be hideously cringeworthy and you'll have to avoid them for the rest of your life lest you are forced to admit as much. This book, by a fellow 26er, is a glorious exception. It's a beautifully written, hauntingly crepuscular story about the margins of society, tough and tender and full of brilliant images that stay with you. Highly readable, highly recommended and genuinely ace. Roger Horberry
I've been overdosing on theatre in the last few weeks. There's a lot of good stuff on in London. I've just seen The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic), Waiting for Godot (Haymarket) and All's Well that Ends Well (National) and enjoyed them all. But the best was A Little Night Music at the Garrick, a revival of Sondheim's musical from the 1980s. Sondheim is so brilliant. He takes a film by Ingmar Bergman and turns it into a stage musical full of lovely music and joyfully clever lyrics. Loved it. John Simmons
BONJOUR TO LYON
One for typophiles and magaziniacs; a new typeface called Lyon became the text face for the New York Times Magazine in June 2009. It was created by the Netherlands-based studio Atelier Carvalho Bernau and is based on designs by 16th century punch cutter Robert Granjon. It makes a refreshing addition to publishing faces and has an elegant writerly feel. No doubt we will discuss further over here. Tim Rich
GHOSTING: A DOUBLE LIFE
Jennie Erdal Canongate, £7.99
This is a revealing account of the second-oldest profession – of which many of us are proud members. Ever-since-ever, writers have been putting words in the mouths of others – from Greek choruses, to celebrity ‘autobiographies’, to chairman’s statements. Jennie began her career as a translator and editor of Russian literature but she gradually became a complicit victim of a complex interdependency with her flamboyant publisher - for whom she eventually wrote two novels, a newspaper column and numerous articles. There are many reflections on the meaning of writing for others, and the complex relationships involved. Her boss Tiger is a hugely successful and capricious diva who craves attention and uses her as an emotional and professional crutch. Her eye-watering descriptions of him reminded me of quite a few clients over the years. Tiger, while affecting a boyish ingenuousness, was actually endowed with a Machiavellian shrewdness. He could flatter, disparage, coax and intimidate, interchangeably and with consummate artistry. It’s an illuminating new take on the odd couple syndrome - manically addicted to loving and loathing each other.
Writing for clients requires a lot of listening and reading between the lines, before interpreting their ambitions in a way that appeals to their audiences. We all play a game; a delicate diplomacy often danced on the knife-edge of their insecurities and our need to get a cheque at the end. It’s a business transaction. No one is under any illusions. Our mercenary status and relative anonymity is the price we pay for making a good living out of words. As Tiger is bathing in the glory of ‘his’ second novel ghosted by Jennie she broods - Language creates us and defines us, but the stuff I was producing was a curious hybrid. I could never really trust it; it was too artificial, too much like a confidence trick. In odd melodramatic moments I thought of myself as a slave, toiling away, belonging to someone else. Tom Lynham
Heaven and Earth is such a perfect title because this show celebrates our spirituality and physicality - from the stars in our eyes to the mud between our toes. Richard’s work blurs the idiotic boundaries between creative disciplines. He is a walking artist who rearranges the world around him as he travels. This vast production at Tate Britain is so tactile and spatial I floated around in an ecstatic daze. The scales of activity are vertiginous; from prospective walks plotted on Ordnance Survey maps, to circles, spirals, squares and lines shuffled or constructed on deserts, pastures, scree slopes and peat bogs. Thirty Seven Campfires is a walk in the Sierra Tarahumara - Mexico. Walking Flowing is a 473-mile wander across France from the Loire to the Rhône. From Pass to Pass is a 12-day hike in the Zanskar Mountains of Ladakh. The photographs, hand paintings, rocks and words make a muscular language that feels squeezed out of the land. We are confronted with sheer-drops of exquisite typography - skies of sentences, vistas of lists, streams of consciousness, mountains of observations. Punctuating the immaculate graphics, walls of splattered mud and St Austell clay look as if they have been created by the weather. Rafts of scrubbed boulders and spilt slate float on the gallery floor looking so delicious you could almost eat them. Sometimes the giant words become so multi-dimensional, they develop meanings way beyond their perceived values. Writing great stories is about distilling narratives from the chaos around us, and signposting audiences through complex territories. Our job is to help clients see the familiar in unfamiliar ways, and look inside themselves to figure out where they are going, and why they are going there. Tom Lynham
MONOCLE PODCASTS
I listen to the Monocle podcasts as I walk from London Bridge to work in Shoreditch, and they provide me with a thoroughly entertaining half hour or so. A bit like the magazine itself, you can't help but wonder a little bit about who the core target audience is, given the sheer variety of the content. One segment might examine the emerging trends from the latest arms fair, the next might be about the provenance of food in their chosen destination, another might look at the latest J-pop coming out of Tokyo. But it all seems to hang together quite well in the end, thanks in no small part to the well-heeled charm of Tyler Brule and his contributing editors. Give them a try on your next train journey. Or something. James Hogwood
NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU
Miranda July Canongate £7.99
Miranda writes with a dangerous beauty and alarming insights into the wonders of how on earth we talk to each other. Her stories are funny and sensual autopsies of the ridiculous expectations that make adult-hood so dysfunctionally glorious. In this dazzling collection the incidents are so slight, but her insight goes so deep. Her unravellings of tiny details and flitting happenstance light up immensely complex areas of life. She explores the fragility of relationships and the perils of faking-it. The Boy from Lam Kien describes an acquaintance between a woman and the young son of a neighbour. The boy manoeuvres his way into her house, and they play a peculiar game of territorial rights; the boy daring her to let him invade her spaces, and her fears about being home-alone with a minor in a culture where such encounters are loaded. During one excruciating mention of sleeping arrangements in her bedroom she says - He gave me a long, strange stare, and my mind bent like a spoon. Their exchanges are spun around the insatiable curiosity of a child for adult life - and the mysterious acquisitions and rituals to come. And the retrospective reflections of an adult - trying to measure the experience of childhood against the reality of being a grown up. As the boy leaves her house she says - I shut my door and listen to the sucking sound. It was the sound of Earth hurtling away from the apartment at a speed too fast to imagine. Tom Lynham
I like a book that explains clearly, humorously and intelligently everything that’s wrong with our way of thinking, then gives us a plan to put it right. How about this one? Sarah McCartney
This sweet little show of works on paper at the ICA is inspired by concrete poetry and text-based practices that originated in the 60s and 70s. Robert Smithson and Carl Andre are best known for their minimalist sculpture, and Vito Acconci for his performance work. The thing I had forgotten was the sheer percussive power of the typewriter. These artists used their Remingtons like hammers and chisels to carve characters deep into the page and re-discover words. The evocative quality of letter striking ribbon striking paper is a reminder of the drama of the embossed word in these times of purring laser printers. Other artists abandon comprehensibility altogether, and pound the typewriter keyboard like a deaf Beethoven to construct blocks of letters and phrases that play off each other like poignant chord structures. The excellent catalogue - ROLAND - includes a neat essay by Douglas Coupland who talks about visual and non-visual thinkers, the erotic charge he got from his earliest encounters with the words of Lichtenstein, Warhol and Jenny Holzer - and (ahhhhh) the enduring joys of Helvetica. Tom Lynham
TED TALKS
You probably already know about TED talks. But if you don't, TED stands for Technology, Education, Design, and you must check it out. TED is a wide-ranging annual conference in America that looks very broadly at subjects within these themes. The TED site is a seemingly endless mine for fascinating information about all sorts of things that just feel relevant, whether or not you were interested or looking for it in the first place. And that's probably a testament to how accessibly each presenter discusses their topic. In the past few days, I've devoured talks about the science of happiness, why our choices are never as rational as we like to think they are, and poems about vice and its consequences. The emphasis throughout is on entertainment, and the breadth of subject matter means that you're sure to find something that piques your interest. James Hogwood
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF CURD THE LION (AND US!) IN THE LAND AT THE BACK OF BEYOND
Alan Gilliland Raven's Quill, £14.99 or £10.72 on Amazon
Strolling through Waterstone’s on a recent Saturday afternoon, we were virtually accosted by a man waving this book at us. Listening to him, it turned out he was in fact the author of this children’s book. I asked a few questions that revealed he was once graphics editor of The Telegraph. He waffled on a bit about four soft toy animals in search of a stolen brooch and then showed us some quite superb black and white illustrations. We were quite taken by the old fashioned storytelling and the nod towards Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He signed a copy and I merrily trotted towards the checkout with book under my arm. My daughter Martha (9) has not stopped reading or talking about this book ever since. John Fountain
Zadie Smith (Ed.) Hamish Hamilton, from £9.99 on Amazon
I've just finished reading this, which, as the name suggests, is a book of other people. Each story, written by a different author, explores a different character. And whilst it's not the most consistent collection of short stories I've read, a few really zing out as intriguing studies. Some, like the affectionate "Rhoda" by Jonathan Safran Foer, simply capture a tone of voice especially well. Others, like "J Johnson" by Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds, tell reported histories of sorts. But for me the stand-out piece is "Jordan Wellington Lint" by comic artist Chris Ware, who tells his story of a boy from birth to adolescence as much through typography and infographics as he does his signature cute-yet-melancholy drawing style. It's a lovely example of what you can achieve with an extreme economy of language, too. James Hogwood
THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH: HOW THE NAZIS DESTROYED DEMOCRACY AND SEIZED POWER IN GERMANY
Richard J Evans Penguin, £12.99 or £9.09 on Amazon
Part of the reason why the period between 1918 and 1945 retains such a grip on our collective imaginations is that the answer to the question 'How could it happen?' appears to be both unsatisfactory and unlikely. How often do you see a fully-functioning state - defeated in war yes, but still with the full apparatus of a nation - implode in slow motion? Evans, in the first of his trilogy on Nazi Germany shows us how. The causes lay not so much in the post-WW1 settlement, but in the very birth of Germany as a modern nation - it's militaristic culture, a fear of socialist revolution, a sense of destiny even. It is, as you would expect from one of the world's leading historians, rigorously scholarly, but with its erudition lightly worn and prose that reads like a thriller. A very necessary book. Rishi Dastidar
THE KING OF MADISON AVENUE: DAVID OGILVY AND THE MAKING OF MODERN ADVERTISING
Kenneth Roman Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99 or £15.19 on Amazon
Wonderfully detailed story of how O&M came to be. The man himself comes over as a likable, occasionally brilliant, egomaniac. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of advertising. Some useful stuff on writing but if you've read "The Unpublished.." or "Ogilvy on.." then you've seen it before. Roger Horberry
Here's an idiosyncratic free download for all 26ers of a secret Luddite persuasion. It's called Typewriter and it allows you the exact functionality that an old typewriter would – one font, no delete key or backspacing, no nasty modern stuff of any sort. Not even any Tippex solution. Why bother? It's amazing how it makes you concentrate. If you feel that you've turned into a lazy cut and paste monkey, there's nothing like Typewriter to make you re-engage with the words on the page, er, screen. It will be the first time you've felt an adrenaline surge in front of your keyboard for ages. Although the first mistake will drive you mad, enjoy anyway... Martin Lee
UNTHINKING DESIGNERS PROSTITUTE THEIR CRAFT
Wallpaper magazine, in conjunction with St Bride Library and industry organisation Type, recently asked designers to redesign 'tart cards'. They invited each contributor "to find the tart hiding in every type and create their own graphic numbers". The result was a collection of cards heavy with design innuendo and crass sexual allusion. Fortunately, one designer – Mike Dempsey – saw past the opportunity for brainless graphic masturbation that dehumanises people and put the entire issue of prostitution in a wider context. Read his letter and graphic response here. Tim Rich
COUNTRY LORE AND LEGENDS
Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson Penguin, £4.99 list, or £3.49 on Amazon
Part of Penguin’s latest series, ‘English Journeys’, (and doesn’t that conjour up a delightful image of a penguin with suitcase packed, waddling up and down the highways and byways of the land?) this extract from Westwood and Simpson’s 2005 Lore of the Land collects and, where needed, demystifies a wide range of folktales. Find out what really happened to the murderers of Thomas à Becket, the correct way to put a ghost to rest and why the Cambridge Book Fish was probably a hoax. Rishi Dastidar
David Mellor was one of that great generation of multi-disciplinary designers who could tackle everything from traffic lights to dessert spoons. This beautifully designed visitor centre near Hathersage in Derbyshire is the site of a working cutlery factory – still a close-knit family operation, involving David’s son and grandson. (David himself sadly died earlier this month.) You can buy his wares at a posh shop on Sloane Square, but a visit to the factory to see them being handcrafted from lumps of iron is a more satisfying experience. Nick Asbury
DRAWING IN A PRINTING MACHINE
David Hockney Annely Juda Fine Art, Dering Street, London
A small, free and fascinating exhibition at the Annely Juda gallery, just off Oxford Street. It includes 28 limited-edition prints by Hockney, all created using computer software. A room full of seated portraits of Hockney’s friends and family is brilliantly displayed – really hits you as you walk in. Recommended for a small taste of Yorkshire in the heart of London. Nick Asbury
INNOCENT: OUR STORY AND SOME THINGS WE’VE LEARNED
Richard Reed and Dan Germain Penguin, £14.99 list, or £8.99 on Amazon
The rise of innocent has been important to 26. Most 26 members (who include some people from innocent) have watched and admired innocent’s success, taking heart from the fact that words have been an important part of that success. I’ve certainly been one of the admirers, referring to their work in books and even writing a book about them in the Great brand stories series.
So here is their story in their own words (fewer than I wrote about them but lots more pictures) and the words are from Richard Reed and Dan Germain. If you’re a budding entrepreneur – or if you have any vague notion that one day it would be good to start your own business – this is a book for you. It’s written mainly from the perspective of helping others to learn. They should issue it to every participant in The Apprentice. So read and learn. You might even end up rich – and not have to work for Sir Alan Sugar. John Simmons
National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London until 7 June. £12 entry
There's still time to catch this Picasso show. Among the works inspired by Velázquez and Manet, there's a fabulous hairy Van Gogh-esque man with a green spotty tongue eating an ice cream. I love the description: "The coarse and fraying straw hat infects the face with the same prickling edges; red, black and green bristles stand for hair, beard and eyelashes, while a green lozenge cheek links the oddly rhyming ear and nose." So if your life is inexplicably bereft of infectious hats and rhyming ears and noses, see what you're missing at the National
Gallery. Fiona Thompson
Picasso was a genuine genius, one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. This
exhibition makes that perfectly clear unless you've got a sad prejudice against modern art. It's mainly about Picasso's relationship with artists of the past. It shows that Picasso and modern art didn't just emerge out of nowhere. In making clear Picasso's knowledge of and respect for previous artists – Velazquez, Manet, Poussin, Van Gogh – it helps you look at all these artists with fresh eyes. But Picasso didn't just draw on other artists as 'influences' - the work by Picasso in this exhibition is a direct response to those artists as Picasso painted his own versions of their work. It's inspiring and revealing to see an artist studying, learning and re-imagining great works of art. The reworkings (several of them) of Velazquez's Las Meninas are like master classes by Picasso - you have the feeling of being there with him, looking over his shoulder, as he finds new ways of seeing the original and expressing it in his own style. John Simmons
THE CHAMBERS DICTIONARY
Chambers Harrap, £25 list, or £21.25 on Amazon
I know, I know… recommending a dictionary probably makes me sound like Lynne Truss’s long-lost half-brother. But, apart from being written in a refreshingly easy-going, contemporary style, a small but genius touch that won me over to the 11th edition of Chambers, published last year. The title page for each new letter is set in a different and appropriate typeface – Baskerville for B, Futura for F, Novarese for N, and so on. They give you the full alphabet, plus designer, date and country of origin. A simple, but great idea. Jim Davies
Peter Oborne Pocket Books, £8.99 list, or £4.94 on Amazon
Peter Oborne has been a Cassandra amongst political reporters for a while now, despairingly pointing out the mighty fall that the political system was storing up for itself. While this book is far too nuanced to say ‘I told you so’, the events of the last few weeks have confirmed its central thesis – that we have returned to a venal style of politics last practiced in the eighteenth century – with a vengeance. With forensic detail and a controlled fury he tracks how and why our politicians have arrived here. He’s less optimistic, alas, that there’s a simple solution. Rishi Dastidar
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN & THE ROYAL GAME
Stefan Zweig Pushkin Press, £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
Stefan Zweig suddenly seems to be everywhere: Pushkin Press are reprinting his books and friends keep talking about him. An Austrian Jew, he was famous in the early 20th century for his biographies and novellas. I loved his short story ‘The Royal Game’ – the compelling tale of an impromptu chess tournament on board a ship bound for Buenos Aires. His novel, ‘Beware of Pity’, is also worth a read. It’s a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone confuses pity for love. Fiona Thompson
Steven Poole Abacus, £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
A timely and highly readable investigation into the debasement of language by our glorious leaders. Basically it points out how they dissemble without seeming to - important stuff for anyone interesting in the integrity of language. Bitter and twisted in the best way possible. I haven't quite finished it so it may go a bit Mills and Boon towards the end, but somehow I doubt it. Roger Horberry
It’s always a treat to see David Hare speak, and seeing him read his monologue ‘Berlin’ was equally so. Now published with the companion ‘Wall’, the two texts meditate on places where walls have come to dominate, both physically and mentally – the German capital, where the wall has come down and people are trying to work out what defines them in its absence; and Israel and Palestine, where a wall is going up and people fear how it will define them. Hare is engaged, passionate but never clumsy or hectoring, and he has a happy way with a telling anecdote. These are great narratives, for sure, but also some very good pieces of political journalism too. Rishi Dastidar
Since 1597, Thomas Gresham’s college in the City of London has been an oasis of learning in a sea of commerce. Every year, new professors are appointed to talk at lunchtimes and in the evenings on a variety of different subjects, including astronomy, physic, divinity and rhetoric. And for those of you who can’t make them, the Gresham College website now has video and audio recordings, and transcripts of every lecture. It’s a veritable treasure trove of some of the finest minds grappling with some big issues, and its well worth a nosy round. Rishi Dastidar
HITLER
Ian Kershaw Penguin, £16.99 or £11.89 on Amazon
A brick of a book at just under 1,000 pages, but horribly compelling. Kershaw whips through Hitler’s formative years – abusive father, doting mother, tendency to rant – but doesn’t attempt to pycho-analyse him. Instead, he focuses on charisma and the idea of ‘Working towards the Fuhrer’ to explain his rise to power. He redraws the Third Reich as a complete absence of political and legislative structures: an appalling free-for-all held together by a lazy, late-rising Fuhrer who pontificates on a range of issues (living space, autarky, the Jews) but leaves his acolytes to turn racist fantasy into reality. Kershaw rejects the ‘mad dictator’ explanation for the Nazi tragedy. He acknowledges Hitler as the ‘enabler’, but also points the finger of blame at many others, including the military hierarchy, the aristocracy and the 60,000 doctors who voted in favour of systematic ‘euthenasia’ during the 1930s. Disturbing to say the least. Fraser Southey
It’s not often you come out of a film immediately wanting to see it again, but that’s how I felt after watching ‘In the Loop’. Essentially, the film is ‘The Thick of It goes to Washington’, as Tom Hollander’s hapless MP bungles his way through the corridors of power, undermined at every turn by his gauche assistant, played by Chris Addison. The script is a delight, and Peter Capaldi dominates whenever he’s on screen, as the bile-spewing, perma-swearing Director of Communications, Malcolm Tucker. It’s a brilliant satire on politics, the road to war and the special relationship - with coruscatingly inventive swearing. Fiona Thompson
NAPLES '44: AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER IN THE ITALIAN LABYRINTH
Norman Lewis Eland, £10.99 or £7.69 on Amazon
It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all the things that justify a city's existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of bricks. There is little food, little water, no salt, no soap. A lot of Neapolitans have lost their possessions, including most of their clothing, in the bombings, and I have seen some strange combinations of garments about the streets, including a man in an old dinner jacket, knickerbockers and army boots, and several women in lacy confections that might have been made up from curtains. Today at Posilippo I stopped to watch the methodical dismemberment of a stranded German half-track by a number of youths who were streaming away from it like leaf-cutter ants, carrying pieces of metal of all shapes and sizes. Fifty yards away a well-dressed lady with a feather in her hat squatted to milk a goat. At the water's edge below, two fisherman had roped together several doors salvaged from the ruins, piled their gear on these and were about to go fishing. Inexplicably no boats are allowed out, but nothing is said in the proclamation about rafts. Everyone improvises and adapts. Tim Rich
Wally Olins Thames & Hudson, £9.95 or £6.47 on Amazon
More wise words from the master. Wally's always a pleasure to read thanks to his all-to-rare combination of clarity and conviction. OK, some of this will be vaguely familiar to anyone who's read his other books but that doesn't make "Brand Handbook" any less essential. The practical stuff in Part Two is worth the price of admission on its own. Roger Horberry
Nick Hornby recently selected The Invisible Woman as one of his top twenty books, but don’t let that put you off, because this is one of those rare books that actually lives up to the blurb on its back cover. What’s it about? Ellen Ternan, an unsuccessful Victorian actress turned school teacher – who was also Charles Dickens’ abiding obsession for 13 years, probably also his mistress and possibly the mother of his two illegitimate children. The book combines history, biography and mystery – because Ternan is the ‘secret’ that Dickens and Dickensians tried to erase from history. Compelling and moving, one of the best books about Dickens ever written turns out to be a story about someone else. Fitting perhaps, for a novelist whose greatest characters usually play a supporting role in somebody else’s story. Fraser Southey
Daniel Price Ten Speed Press, £12.50 or £10.99 on Amazon
This special book was introduced to me by David Hieatt from howies a few years ago.
Subtitled ‘A Wandering Artist’s Journal’ (mainly because that’s what it is), the author writes about the details of his life – trips to the mountains, the first day of summer, hanging out with his kids, mowing the lawn, and he sketches things along the way.
What you’re left with is a sense that life is made up of great moments, both big and small, and the only way to really capture them is to note them down, draw little pictures of them and build a low-key journal of your life. It’s really beautiful in a lo-fi, slightly untouched by progress kind of way. And it’s quite Zen, without being up its own arse.
I think Mr Price lives a life that we’d all quite like to live – the all-natural version of Jack Kerouac, but with a family and self-built writing shack and DIY sauna to come home to. He is definitely one of the good guys. Dan Germain
In October 1999, Paul Auster asked listeners to his radio show to send in true stories. The response was overwhelming with over 4,000 submissions. Auster chose the best of them and created a book packed full of remarkable storytelling. For example:
“As I was walking down Stanton Street early one Sunday morning, I saw a chicken a few yards ahead of me. I was walking faster than the chicken, so I gradually caught up. By the time we approached Eighteenth Avenue, I was close behind. The chicken turned south on Eighteenth. At the fourth house along it turned and hopped up the front steps and wrapped sharply on the storm door with its beak. After a moment the door opened, and the chicken went in.”
“Chicken” is just one of many submitted. The stories cover categories such as animals, objects, war and love and each piece is fascinating, charming and often hilarious. John Fountain
Tom Wolfe Picador, £12.00 list, or £8.39 on Amazon
Hmm, with about nine zillion pages it's more like a novel in full. But don't let that put you off - anyone who enjoyed ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ will lap up the dysfunctional but brilliantly drawn characters, the satire and the storytelling. Strangely compelling. Roger Horberry
BONFIRE OF THE BRANDS: HOW I LEARNT TO LIVE WITHOUT LABELS
Neil Boorman Canongate, £12.99 list, or £9.09 on Amazon
I rarely read books related to my day job in branding, and it’s rarer that I’d recommend any that I do; but I’ve just finished Boorman’s book, and was pleasantly surprised. Boorman was a label festishist who underwent a Damascene conversion, and decided to de-label his life. In fine and publicity-grabbing style, he destroyed his cherished cache of top-designer schmuter and gadgets in a colossal public conflagration. He was drawing attention to how so much of his own identity and sense of self-worth had been constructed over the years through the black arts of brand creation. A willing collusion, which he resolved to deconstruct. What makes it interesting, and different from the smug sermonising of Naomi Klein, is Boorman’s honesty at how difficult this is to do, and of the near psychological collapse and social alienation he suffered by seeing it through. It’s a fascinating human document, rather than a glib polemic, which refuses to simplify a path through an ethical maze in which we are all embroiled. Robert Mighall
Clive James Picador, £7.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
Volume two of James’ travails finds him fresh off the boat at Southampton, and then desperately trying to avoid living in Earls Court, avoid working and avoid ex-girlfriends. All the tropes of bachelor living are here: eye-wateringly bad diets, nosey landladies, all blotted out by much booze. The jokes are in fine order, the sixties are starting to swing, and most startlingly of all, some self-awareness is starting to crack Clive’s carapace. And there’s some wise advice too: “Think twice before you get mixed up with a writer, and ten times before you marry one. Writers want things to be over, so that they can write the elegy.” Rishi Dastidar
You may remember the fuss when The Atlantic published an article called ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ last year. David Wolman hit back in Wired magazine, saying that the internet is simply a handy scapegoat for information overload. Now Nicholas Carr, the author of the original Atlantic article, takes his argument a step further in The Sun, a leftfield American literary magazine. In ‘Computing the Cost’, Carr claims that Google’s assumptions about how we should use our brains will benefit governments, corporations and other large institutions and threaten the kind of contemplative, reflective intelligence that is most valuable and most human. Fiona Thompson
RESTORATION
Rose Tremain Sceptre, available used from Amazon from only 23p
This wonderful book is a beautifully imagined collision of characters and motives. Set in the Restoration, it opens with a heart stopping scene-setter that claws at the meaning of life, and introduces the philosophical and scientific preoccupations of the times. Aristocrats and sycophants blessed by the court of King Charles II live in a glittering bubble of self-aggrandisement, excess and debauchery - all the more frenetic following the grim years of Puritanism. Those who fall from grace slither into a cesspool of poverty, profligacy and scabrous diseases. Our hero Merivel is a glorious bundle of contradictions. He is introduced as an aspiring physician clambering up the greasy pole of regal beneficence. But blinded by lust and ambition, nothing is what it seems. He is appointed veterinarian to the King’s spaniels, and a ‘paper groom’ to one of the royal mistresses. Merivel makes the big mistake of falling for his forbidden bride, and is despatched on a journey to purgatory via Bedlam. Tom Lynham
Cumbersome sort of name isn’t it? And would it be ungracious to suggest someone at the agency missed a trick by designing the logo with stripy lines? Ah well, these Swedes are a law unto themselves on such matters so we’ll skip over the cosmetic and look at the rather exciting bigger picture.
Fact is Spotify is astounding, liberating and legal. From now you can listen to an extraordinary library of music without paying for the privilege.
Just like iTunes most artists are covered, you can, create your own playlists and track down your favourite old album without fear of an horrid black spider leaping out at you.
Yes, you’ll have to contend with the occasional 30-second radio ad, but frankly who cares. Spotify is a whole new way of using music and nothing compares to the joy of being able to walk free in a library of this size and simply explore. John Fountain
THE BELIEVERS
Zoe Heller Fig Tree, £16.99 list, or £8.49 on Amazon. And due out in paperpack this month
Joel is a powerful New York human rights lawyer married to Audrey, a brittle figure who idolises her husband but is caustic to most other people in her orbit. Just as he’s about to defend an Arab American who attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Joel has a stroke. In the aftermath, every member of his family grapples to decide what they really believe in and which direction their lives will take from this point forward. This book gives a wonderful account of two parents blessed with an unassailable belief in their convictions, contrasted with family and friends who are less sure of themselves, more prone to doubt, and more able to see life in shades of grey. Fiona Thompson
For those of us who like to judge a book by its cover, a wry-yet-chirpy blog comparing and contrasting book cover design from around the world, along with pithy commentary. The different takes for different editions and markets is intriguing. Tailor made for 26ers who walk the line between words and design. Shown here, Art Spiegelman's cover for the Penguin Deluxe Classics Edition of Paul Auster’s ‘New York Trilogy’. Get under the covers at http://www.thebookdesignreview.com. Jim Davies
THE ROAD
Cormac McCarthy Picador, £7.99 list, or £2.99 on Amazon
Riveting, devastating, a real mindf**k of a novel – ‘The Road’ picks you up, pulls you along and drops you in a heap at the other end. With his inimitable prose, McCarthy creates a harrowing future that’s disturbingly possible to imagine. This is one of the most moving and haunting - yet somehow beautiful - books I’ve read. One not to be missed. Heather Atchison
Martin Amis Vintage, £7.99 list or £5.99 on Amazon
Controversial, polemical, up for the fight… in some senses, there’s no one better than Amis to plunge headfirst into the most pressing political issues of the age. The title of this collection of fiction, reviews and essays since 11 September 2001 refers to “the defining moment”, when America “had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.” There is, of course, verve and a dark wit to be found here, as well as some illumination. But there’s also a notion that writing in anger doesn’t necessarily lead to a greater understanding. Which we could all do with right now. Rishi Dastidar
Edith Templeton Pallas Athene Arts, 12.99 list and on Amazon
If the credit crunch has reduced us all to armchair travellers, we can at least treat ourselves to a classy companion. Edith Templeton - erudite, acerbic and bone dry witty - is nothing if not classy.
She’s a bit of a snob and she can be judgmental (Piero della Francesca comes off particularly badly) but, oh boy, can she write. This account of her time spent travelling alone through Italy in the early 50s is a masterclass in cliche free travel writing.
Describing her encounters with art, architecture, food, and a variety of impressionable Italian men, she manages to be evocative, informative and very, very funny, all without breaking a sweat. Evidently a woman of considerable appetites, she’s passionate on occasion (Raphael and Virgil press her buttons) but never sentimental. She’s idiosyncratic, she opinionated and she drinks a lot of red wine. Really, what’s not to love? Mandy Wheeler
Linda Grant Virago Press, £11.99 list, or £7.65 on Amazon
Recently, a marketeer for natural foods described the use of chemical additives to me as ‘like wearing make up’ – possibly not the best comment to make to a girl sporting Clinique Longlast Lipstick in Bamboo Pink.
But dismissing women’s love of fashion and beauty as frivolous, weak-minded and nonsensical is currently all the rage. Even the usually quite sensible David Mitchell was at it in the Guardian: “Show me someone who’s genuinely interested in glamour and I’ll ask you why you’ve introduced me to your twat of a friend.” Thank
Eve then for The Thoughtful Dresser by Booker-shortlisted author Linda Grant, an intelligent analysis of the importance of fashion in life.
If you want to know how department stores helped emancipate 19th century ladies, why Harold Wilson tried to ban Vogue from reporting on Dior’s New Look, or what an Auschwiz survivor cum boutique owner knows about the role of clothes in defining humanity, you’ll find it all in here.
As a collection of essays, it’s baggy in parts, tight in others, but offers a fascinating insight into our relationship with fashion. So pop on some lippy, slip into something less comfortable and give it a go. Lisa Desforges
Each month the crew from underconsideration.com choose a word and invite users to create a visual interpretation. The results can be startling, amusing, elegant, predictable, unpredictable, obscure, weird, crap, lovely and a million other adjectives. www.underconsideration.com. Tim Rich
WORDLE
A beguiling site that will ruin your working day. Simply throw a block of your own writing into the wordle space and watch as the whole piece is reorganised into a word cloud, based on quantity of repetition of key words. But be warned. It’s potentially destabilising if you discover that you’re overusing certain words to an almost ridiculous degree... www.wordle.net. Martin Lee
CHOCOLATE AND CUCKOO CLOCKS
Alan Coren Canongate £20.00, or £9.49 on Amazon
Four decades of wit and wisdom from a man I'm legally obliged to describe as a heavyweight humourist. It's beautifully written, witty and wry rather than laugh out loud funny, but all the better for that. Keep it in your loo - and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Roger Horberry
This is an excellent blog, mostly on issues to do with creativity, written by the famous advertising copywriter, Dave Trott. Always interesting. Martin Lee
ENERGISE!
James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky Beautiful Books, £12.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
From wind farms and electric cars to recycled nappies and sustainable tourism, energy has become a mainstream topic of conversation. Almost everyone now has a view on some aspect of how we power our lives. We really do face some fascinating issues, particularly the pressing need to decide which technologies and methods we should back to guarantee our future resources, and our future. Unfortunately, the dominant public narrative is stuck around issues of personal consumption, not least time-wasting schemes such as calculating your personal carbon footprint. Government agencies and environmental groups seem to favour moralising about our behaviour rather than developing breakthrough thinking on the fundamental issue – supply. Energise! examines why this situation has developed, how we can look at energy issues from a different perspective, and why we should spend more time thinking about how to transcend climate change than how man-made it is. Astute, thoroughly researched and delightfully clear, this book manages to offer a measured argument for a radical change of emphasis. Or as the authors write; ''If the world could be more thoughtful about energy supply, we could all afford to be thoughtless about our personal use of energy.'' Tim Rich
A remarkable personal collection of bank notes from 1930s Germany. Each town commissioned designers to illustrate its own local currency, and the notes reflect the preoccupations and sensibilities of the times. Tim Rich
PRESENT & CORRECT
Nice little online shop full of designer goodness. Their A to Z of Endangered Species poster (pictured here) has long been a fixture on our wall. Nick Asbury
TIM THE TINY HORSE
Harry Hill Faber Children's Books, £9.99 list or £5.99 on Amazon
Charming, whimsical, poignant, funny… but enough about me. No, this is a real treat, a seemingly simple kids’ book complete with faux naïf drawings, that’s actually a subtle commentary on the human condition. The adventures of Tim the tiny horse who lives in a matchbox with a Tic-Tac box as a conservatory are insightful and delightful, with plenty enough weird surrealism to stop it becoming syrupy. Who’d have thought Harry Hill (author and illustrator) had it in him? Jim Davies
Claud Cockburn Penguin, available from amazon marketplace, various prices.
This book brings together Cockburn's three volumes of autobiography published between 1956 and 61 and adds some additional fireworks from 67, the year this collected edition was first issued. It spans everything from his determination to set up an independent weekly political paper free of the controlling fingers of the establishment (he succeeded, it was called The Week) through to his days as a Times correspondent, a war reporter for the Daily Worker, a Punch columnist and a member of the editorial board of Private Eye. Along the way he describes his experiences as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, an interviewer of world leaders during numerous international crises (Hitler blacklisted him) and a long-term target of Special Branch and friends. He was an irritant to reactionaries, especially those in the Labour Party, and the wry wit, charisma and wisdom in this book suggests he made for a formidable adversary in any argument. Despite the incision of his analyses into hubris, oppression, corruption and war, 'I, Claud' is sustained by an inspiring belief in our desire and ability to change the world for the better. Tim Rich
Next Easter, 26 will again partner International Pen at its FREE THE WORD festival on the South Bank. This harrowing article by Amelia Gentleman reporting from Colombo on the assassination of the Sri Lankan newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunge (left) is why we do it. It’s sobering to think that countries to which westerners flock for fun, freedom and even spiritual sustenance, are run by brutal regimes that suppress free speech and repress dissent. I won’t go into detail here, Amelia’s riveting account says it all. This link takes you to Wickrematunge’s final editorial; his own obituary which he wrote knowing he was next on the list. Tom Lynham
OLIVER POSTGATE
I was really sad to hear the other week that Oliver Postgate had died. With the equally wonderful Peter Firmin, the visual half of the partnership, Oliver created many great programmes for children's TV back in the 60s and 70s. These were 10-minute films, literally homemade, made unmissable by the quality of the characters and stories. Along with other students at the time (what innocent days) I used to tune into the latest episode of Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss or the Clangers. And years later when I had kids of my own, we sat down with them and watched the programmes over again with renewed pleasure. Oliver's flowing words, and his beautiful voice, were the vital part of the lasting appeal - funny. touching, charming, simply making you feel good about life. "In the lands of the north, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea..." It's the greatest gift you can pass on, from generation to generation - the pure pleasure of words. Get the DVDs, watch them again, preferably with a young child of your family. It's still magic. John Simmons
ONE TRACK MIND - A REVEALING INSIGHT INTO THE OBSESSED MINDS OF MEN
Tony Davidson Virgin £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
One for the boys. This is a compendium of witty photographs of inanimate objects which bear a passing resemblance to breasts – some more overtly than others. So we have page after page of boob-shaped cacti and buoys, fried eggs and fire hydrants, windows and street lights. More saucy seaside postcard than seriously salacious, 'One Track Mind' is interlaced with gently amusing quotes from men about what they find quite so appealing about these female appendages. Before you start thinking this is a one-tit pony, it’s worth remembering that all the proceeds from advertising creative Tony Davidson’s book are being donated to breast cancer research. Jim Davies
One of our nation’s great enthusiasts when it comes to language and creativity – he really should go straight to the top of the 26 wishlist for future speakers. As well as the usual entertaining revelry in language, this collection has plenty of darker and emotionally resonant moments. Nick Asbury
Susan Hill Chatto & Windus, £10 list or £5.99 on Amazon
I was given this book for Christmas and read it on Boxing Day evening. It’s the story of four children who grow up on a bleak farm in the North. The writing is compelling and spare, no extraneous detail. We hear how May ends up looking after her ageing parents, while Colin and Berenice live nearby. ‘And then there was Frank.’ We gradually learn about Frank, the brother who got away and worked in London as a journalist. This is a story of escape and constraints, a subtle and resonant book that keeps you guessing and leaves you wondering. Fiona Thompson
Winner of the most recent Forward prize and shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, Mick Imlah sadly died on the day the latter was announced, having been diagnosed with motor neurone disease two years earlier. The context adds an extra (and probably intended) poignancy to this collection’s title, but it’s one of those works that has ‘major’ written all over it, regardless of the backstory. I’m still getting to grips with the various reference points, which draw deeply on the past and present of the writer’s native Scotland. But you can tell straight away you’re dealing with a technically brilliant poet who can write for the gut as well as the intellect. I particularly like the Gordon Brown one (although it’s not about that Gordon Brown). Nick Asbury
The Paris Review has been publishing interviews with writers since 1953. The subjects in Volume 3 are characteristically frank and accessible, and feel as if they could be sitting at your elbow. The journalists give you just enough biography, then set the scene with vivid descriptors. Edited by Philip Gourevitch with a foreword by Margaret Attwood, this book features sixteen writers who have lots to say about the art of making a living out of words. Georges Simenon, who in 1955 is churning out six novels a year, believes that “Every writer tries to find himself through his characters…” Asked how these characters form the basis of the plot he responds “I have such a man, and such a woman, in such surroundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit?” In 1962, Evelyn Waugh insists on being interviewed in bed in the Hyde Park Hotel. This chapter includes an incredibly funny exchange about interviewing with tape recorders which had me slobbering in the aisle of the plane flying back from Christmas. Joyce Carol Oates interviewed in 1978 was still teaching despite a successful writing career. “Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.” In 1966 Harold Pinter talks revealingly about the struggle of writing, the mysteries of success, and working with actors and directors – particularly Peter Hall. “Hall once held a dot and pause rehearsal for the actors in The Homecoming. Although it sounds bloody pretentious, it was apparently very valuable.” Raymond Carver concludes his 1983 interview with words about the duty of fiction. “It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something durable and made to last, as well as beautiful and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks – a persistent and steady glow, however dim.” Tom Lynham
The Wellcome Collection in Euston Road mounts searching exhibitions tackling difficult subjects. Last year, ‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ was a wonderfully somnambulant investigation into what happens to our minds and bodies when we climb the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire, and their latest show explores how war and medicine have wrestled with each other down the centuries. The excellent catalogue to War and Medicine presents an eviscerating collection of images, voices, disciplines and evidence. The reach of the writing is extraordinary - from battlefield eyewitness reports, to army surgeons’ diaries in Afghanistan, to health and hygiene propaganda posters, to heartbreaking accounts of crippling post-traumatic stress disorder. One Iraqi doctor in Baghdad talks of colleagues being murdered in clinics and in front of their families. “I myself was threatened by patients’ relatives and even by patients themselves. With a gun to my head I gave 15 defibrillator shocks to a dead person because his son was convinced that this would bring him back to life. On another occasion, angry relatives tried to kill me with AK weapons because their family member who had suffered a severe asthmatic attack died, due to lack of oxygen and medication for his illness.” Tom Lynham
This web community/blog/podcast/whatever focuses on "how to stay prolific, brilliant and healthy in the create on demand economy". With a bit of digging you can find genuinely useful stuff about creativity, productivity and inspiration. Equally applicable to freelancers and staff. Rather American in tone but don't let that put you off. www.accidentalcreative.comRoger Horberry
A MOST WANTED MAN
John Le Carré Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99 listr, or £7.59 on Amazon
Crack open a bottle of wine, nestle in a chair and read this in one sitting. It's a tight, well-paced, nuanced thriller, as you would expect of Mr Cornwell. But it also hums with a spirit of disgust at the Western intelligence agencies’ approach to the 'war on terror'. Some of the dialogue is a bit laboured, but the setting, plot and dynamics between protagonists hold your attention, from adept opening to dark close. Tim Rich
Speeches have been much on our minds at 26, what with Philip Collins' lecture, that great Obama acceptance piece and the failure of British politicians to find big words to match the scale of the economic crisis. Here's another remarkable political speech from 2008, this time from journalist and writer Alexander Cockburn (see www.counterpunch.org). Speaking at a conference, Cockburn provides an expert's tour of US Foreign Policy over the years, with some sharp insights on the next President of the United States. There's wit and spit in equal measure. Even if you're not politically-minded, watch this as a speechwriting masterclass in timing. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VBxC48liHmITim Rich
BLACK CAB SESSIONS
Various
Here’s something internetty to make your party go with a swing. The Black Cab Sessions are a quirky catalogue of raw music performed by all sorts of musicians in black cabs driving around cities. Look out for Seasick Steve, The Mules and the sensational Lykke Li who I predict will become a superstar. Oh, and the wonderfully droll introductions by the cab drivers are pretty good too. http://www.blackcabsessions.com/Tom Lynham
ELBULLI
Some of us were lucky enough to hear Farran Adria speak on the Southbank. Farran is the inspiration behind elBulli – the best restaurant in the world. It was a wonderful insight into canny brand management. Ingredients are worshiped. Food hierarchies are blurred. New techniques for cooking fish, fowl, fruit and vegetables are discovered. Esoteric recipes elevate dishes to levels of celestial deification. elBulli receives 800,000 applications for 8,000 covers a year, which of course whets the appetite even more. So if you want to escape the horrors of genetically engineered turkey tune into…
Or drool over the book…
'A Day at elBulli', Phaidon Press, Amazon £19.76.
Tom Lynham
SCHOOL OF LIFE
This is a recommendation for a website plus real life premises. It’s called School of Life, and I’m not yet in a position to properly recommend it because I haven’t visited the shop, however, the website looks cool and fascinating, and very 26. I do know a couple of people that have been signed up as tutors, and they recommend it highly. The idea of there being an expert on the A40 is too intriguing for words. (Now you’re just going to have to check it out, aren’t you...?) http://www.theschooloflife.com/ Martin Lee
THE "BLOG" OF "UNNECESSARY" QUOTATIONS
No party could be without an exciting yuletide game based around the joys of grammar. See the unnecessary quotation mark blog spot for inspiration. I ‘laughed’ so much I ‘cried’. http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/Tom Lynham
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST
Mohsin Hamid Penguin, £7.99 list, or £4.54 on Amazon
‘Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America’. So starts ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid. Shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker, it is a strangely gripping tale which, told by one person, in one location, a Lahore café, over the course of one night, is a pandora’s box of a story. Multilayered and bristling with an unspoken menace, its brilliant ambiguity and restraint play with your sensibilities and suspend judgement until the very last word. Jayne Workman
A suitably titled magazine for 26 members. But its subtitle, ‘Intelligent life on Planet Rock’, more accurately reflects the contents. Quite rightly 2008’s music magazine of the year, ‘Word’ is chock full of top-notch writing, humour, ideas and opinion. It covers more than just music, with film, TV, books and wider cultural themes also getting a look in. The ‘best’ and ‘worst’ section is a monthly hoot and it comes with a free compilation CD of staff picks old and new, which is always worth a whirl. A year’s sub is just £36. What are you waiting for? Jim Davies
WWW.TED.COM
This site offers up all manner of fascinating information under the heading 'Inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers'. Basically it's a mix of writing, video and podcasts culled from the annual TED conference. Not only is the content endless interesting but the site itself is a masterpiece of information architecture that manages to present a huge volume of information in a pleasingly intuitive way. Recommended. www.ted.com. Roger Horberry
NOTES FROM WALNUT TREE FARM
Roger Deakin Hamish Hamilton, £20 or £10 on Amazon
Roger started out as a copywriter working for London advertising agencies before quitting the rat-race to live in a deepest Suffolk. He became a passionate environmental campaigner and devoted himself to connecting us to the planet through books, radio and documentaries. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of jottings taken from the diaries he kept for the last six years of his life. He was a lateral thinker, always challenging logic and questioning sanity. His creaking, breathing oak beamed cottage became a magnet for hedgehogs, squirrels, toads and spiders that moved in and set up home. Dilapidated caravans and railway rolling stock dotted his meadows and on warm summer nights you chose your boudoir to sleep under the stars. The book is full of wonderful stories and observations including: “My house was once an acorn.” And that’s what conversations with Roger did for you; wandered around inside your head and planted seeds that germinated into ideas you could actually build things with. Tom Lynham
I've been looking for this type of book for about, well, 40 years. It provides an informed and engaging overview of many of the world's key periods, from the pharaohs to the Cold War via the Greeks, the Merovingians, the Enlightenment and so on. 39 chapters of concise, compressed but sophisticated history, and all written by the young Gombrich in just six weeks. Amazing. Some of us need that long to write a brochure. I've bought a box-load for my nieces and nephews, and a few more for some of my brainiest adult friends too. And it's only five quid. Tim Rich
A TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE VILLAINOUS BARTHOLOMEW RAKEHELL
Nicholas Law £15 direct from Tangent Books
‘Wherein are Bawdy Tales of Boxing, Bordellos and Bristol Pluck’ as it says on the cover. This is unlike any other book you’ll come across this Christmas. For a start, author Nicholas Law has written the entire thing in 18th century style verse – yet somehow made it laugh-out-loud funny for a contemporary audience. Apparently Law spent years standing around various English Heritage properties dressed as a fop and talking to the public in 18th century English. Working for a theatre company, in case you’re wondering. He also studied 18th century literature at college. Even so, it’s an amazing achievement to make 21st century humour work in the language of Henry Fielding. Not only that, but to make it rhyme. Publisher Tangent Books have carefully designed and packaged the book so the style suits the content – it’s beautiful, with thick creamy paper, specially commissioned black and white illustrations, and printed using Baskerville 1751 typeface throughout. All in all a great read and excellent gift material – though much too racy for maiden aunts. Lu Hersey
Terrific online TV channel showing politics, economics, arts and business programmes. Plus interviews, comment and videos of talks, all spiced with debate and discussion. Tim Rich
Edited by Neil Astley Bloodaxe, £12.00 or £8.40 on Amazon
For many years I've been using poetry in workshops to improve the quality of business writing. I find nearly everyone engages with that during the workshop. But afterwards, poetry gets left outside the door in the cold again. Which is a great shame for all of us, as writers, if we're serious about trying to improve the quality of writing. People retreat into stereotypes about poets and poetry - "difficult, obscure, for people with beards" whatever. This is a book to help you get past those mistaken perceptions. It's an anthology of work by 30 contemporary poets. It comes in the form of a book and a double DVD, so you can both read the poems on the page and also watch and listen to the poets performing their poetry. When you hear a poet read his or her own work, it means so much more. You'll find yourself entranced by the likes of Maura Dooley and Imtiaz Dharker. And at £12 complete you can regard either the book or the DVD as free. John Simmons
I've been reading a lot of poetry recently and one book I'd like to recommend is the new Bloodaxe compilation. In Person 30 Poets. There are some fantastic introductions in here and the book comes with 2 DVDs with six hours of recorded readings. I haven't yet watched these but saw the 45 minute trailer at a Bloodaxe launch event. In fact, although I'm a sucker for good poetry readings - and boy these are good - the thought of watching six hours' worth is a bit of a challenge. But I've come up with a non-trade-marked solution: Poetry tapas (the first of which is to take place tomorrow evening). I've invited a handful of poetry lovers around to my place - each to bring a dish and a bottle of wine – and we'll watch one hour followed by food and chat and then resume for a second hour. Repeat x 2 over the next month or so. Within the selection is one poem I'd like to highlight - What Work Is by US blue-collar poet Philip Levine. It's stunning. Stuart Delves
From Bedlam to chemical lobotomies; a harrowing history of the way people with mental illness have been treated in the US and other developed countries. Why does the World Health Organization say outcomes for people with schizophrenia are likely to be better in poor African countries than in the US? Try drug company conspiracies, medical arrogance and fear of the "insane". This is brilliant factual writing that will change many people's view of the world. Tim Rich
I've just got a new iPhone (and that's a recommendation in itself), and one of the many 'apps' available is a digital version of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies". No, not a peculiar LP, but a set of cards designed to help break you out of a creative deadlock. You just pick a random card from the pack and see what it says. Each shows a little aphoristic phrase that gets the brain working. Some are very oblique, others actually quite direct. For example:
Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate)
Give the game away
Who should be doing this job? How would they do it?
Only one element of each kind
Which frame would make this look right?
and, especially for 26:
Do the words need changing?
They do make you think, and that does help. Plus, if you have an iPhone, the app is free from iTunes. There's more at the Oblique Strategies website. Mike Reed
PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH IDIOMS
Penguin, £8.99 or from £3.55 on Amazon
From ‘putting the cart before the horse’ to being someone’s ‘pride and joy’ this book provides info on loads of idioms and how they should and shouldn’t be used. Be warned. Look up one and get sucked in. An absolute delight that will see you bore clients and friends alike for some time to come but in a highly intelligent way of course! Amanda Folkes
PROVIDED YOU DON'T KISS ME: 20 YEARS WITH BRIAN CLOUGH
Duncan Hamilton Harper Perennial, £8.99 or £4.49 on Amazon
Hamilton was a sort of Boswell for Clough during the latter’s rise and fall as manager of Nottingham Forest. Hamilton’s limpet like tenacity in following Ol’ Big ‘Ead around was rewarded not just in quotes that could be recycled for the evening paper’s headline, but in the sort of access that will never happen again in this age of agents and PR wallahs. The result of this is a warts-close portrait of a man driven, confrontational, impulsive – oh, and brilliant. His account of Clough’s descent in alcoholism is touching and tough, and overall this book is brings him back to life in a startling way. Rishi Dastidar
Artist Roger Hiorns has flooded a disused council flat with 90,000 litres of copper sulphate solution and let the resulting crystals grow to encrust the walls, ceilings etc. Utterly amazing. It's on until the end of the month. Here's a Flickr link and here are some more details. Roger Horberry
STEPHEN FRY'S PODGRAMS
In which the wordy one chats, rants and otherwise entertains in his inimitable style, all downloadable to your MP3 whatsit. Ideal for tedious train journeys. One is constantly in awe of his erudition. Roger Horberry
The first in Peace’s putative Tokyo trilogy is a real-life tale set in the aftermath of Japan’s surrender to end World War II. In the barely existing remains of the capital, two bodies are found close by each other in a city park. And where Hell has literally arrived on Earth, Detective Minami, himself struggling with the demons of his wartime service, appears to have been assigned to the case only to be set up to fail. Peace’s gifts as a stylist – his repetition to evoke the worrying away of dark thoughts in particular – here creates a claustrophobic world which grips as much as the unfolding plot. It’s brutally good. Rishi Dastidar
James Ellroy Arrow Books, £7.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
Furiously paced fictionalization of the Kennedy years complete with Ellroy's usual parade of rogue cops, corrupt politicians and evil crime bosses. The clipped, speed-driven prose makes it almost impossible to follow what's going on, but who cares? It's a hell of a ride. Don't be put off by the thought this is crime writing; it isn't, it's a toxic (and intoxicating) combination of brilliant plotting, sharply drawn characters and intense, almost lyrical, dialogue. If you liked LA Confidential you'll love this. Roger Horberry
Charles Higson Abacus, from 1p used and new on Amazon
While this is far from being the best thing I’ve ever read, it’s highly entertaining in a grisly, Coen Brothers kind of way. Written in an obnoxious first person, the rather far-fetched plot is all about trying to dispose of a body, but only managing to get into a deeper and deeper mess. It says ‘The missing link between Brett Easton Ellis and Dick Emery’ on the cover, and that kind of sums this fast-paced, frantic and wickedly funny book. You can buy it for 1p plus postage on Amazon – that can’t be bad. Jim Davies
Charles Dickens Penguin Classics, £8.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
This week I'm excited because I've just found out that there will be a new adaptation of Dickens' Little Dorrit on BBC TV. Even better it's an adaptation by Andrew Davies. Dickens, for me, is the absolute giant of English literature, up there alongside Shakespeare but funnier, closer, more teeming with life and characters. Set in London too, a dark atmospheric London that is still recognisable 150 years on. Little Dorrit is one of Dickens' great novels - and it's about themes (money - wealth and poverty) that could not be more topical. There's even a bank crash. So watch the TV - and treat yourself by reading the book. John Simmons
Steven Heller Phaidon, £24.95 list, or £14.92 on Amazon
Magazines, book covers, posters, press ads, annual reports, brochures, children’s books, design criticism, photography. There was little in the world of the commercial art that the late US designer Paul Rand couldn’t turn a brilliant hand too. This is an insightful, well-paced, well-informed book on the man and his work, beautifully presented and generously illustrated. If you’re looking for superb graphic design history or serious inspiration, you couldn’t do much better. Jim Davies
Manjit Kumar Icon Books, £20 list, or £12.00 from Amazon
If you need an improving book for the autumn, with which to impress your friends and family, look no further. Manjit Kumar, who is trained as both a philosopher and a physicist, is eminently qualified to bring off this ambitious attempt to bring the story of the discovery of quantum physics to life for the layperson. He mixes up biography, narrative history and lucid explanation of the science involved to create a highly readable account of one of the most important but impenetrable topics of twentieth century thinking. Martin Lee
This is an interactive installation that deals with themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood, and autonomous surveillance. Or as I prefer to describe it, a lovely, simple idea that makes walking into a school building a delightful experience. No words but tons of communication; I want one over my front door. Tim Rich
THE DAILY BEAST
"The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates." Ah, curation – or editing as we used to call it. In fact, the Beast is a rather zizzy online magaziney thing that presents you with selected stories from t'internet in an elegant format. The terrific/terrifying/terrible (delete according to taste) Tina Brown appears to be its creator. I give it 15 beastly months, but do enjoy dipping in over a cup of mid-deadline tea. The Daily Beast was the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop', of course. Its rival was the Daily Brute - surely an online men's magazine aggregator curate's egg thing waiting to happen. Tim Rich
THE LANGUAGE OF FINANCIAL CRISIS
Frank Furedi
Have you too been struck by the near-hysterical language used to describe what is going on in the financial markets? Suddenly bankers are prey to "fear", and we are all heading for "catastrophe". Or as George Bush styles it: "We risk world meltdown". And all this because people have "lost confidence". Much of the media seems content to repeat this master script, and to revel in the vocabulary of chaos and collapse. But is this really what's going on? What do the words used tell us about the situation we're in? And is the language of finance and business contributing to the problems, rather than describing them? In an important article, Frank Furedi takes a measured approach, looking at how "the failure of language is fostering a mood of passivity and fatalism." Tim Rich
THE MASTER BEDROOM
Tessa Hadley Vintage £7.99 list, or £5.14 on Amazon
A 43-year-old woman is driving from London to Wales, all her possessions stacked in the back of her little Citroën, on the way to take care of her mother, who’s losing her memory. What looks like a bundle of dirty washing falls from the sky on top of a car ahead. It turns out to be a swan. The woman refuses to let it be a sign. This is an intriguing novel which never goes quite where you expect it to go. Fiona Thompson
Mircea Cantor Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol until 9 November
This is a disturbingly beautiful show. Cantor explores difficult issues around freedom of individuals and communities, and the transformation of cultural traditions. He uses objects and poetic association to bring questions to our lips: ‘There is an inflation in the value of certainty; we need the opposite.’ I wanted to take a bite out of the gorgeously gold leafed Arch of Triumph, which is all about the symbolism of entry and exit points to life (the Irish countryside is still dotted with grand entrances to long-gone stately homes of absentee British landowners). Another room is imprisoned by a thin skein of barbed wire made out of fingerprints. Take a look at the website below for some lovely observations; a pile of discarded urinals on a building site (just as Duchamp’s much worshipped porcelain has moved on from Tate Modern. And a series of photos called Shortcuts (for which you could be shot at the school I went to). Tom Lynham
Paul Neilan St. Martin's Griffin, £11.95 list, or £8.99 on Amazon
A short and highly readable tale of employee alienation in the world of corporate McJobs. Loads of snappy phrasemaking that I rather like. A bit like a modern Bukowski - lots of drinking, anger and, well, apathy. Roger Horberry
I always thought Alex James was a bit of a prat, but when I'd finished this book I felt entirely differently about him. 'Bit of a Blur' is actually rather wonderfully written in parts, even though there's a fair amount of 'glossing over'. It's funny, insightful and self-deprecating... one of the best rock books I've read, and that's a good few. Jim Davies
David Foster Wallace Abacus, £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
This month’s death of David Foster Wallace robs us of one of – if not the – pre-eminent writer of his generation. Always more of a cult concern here, in his native US he was lionized as the best writer since Pynchon, up there with DeLillo as the true interpreter of contemporary Americana, and an influence on, to name a few, Dave Eggars, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Froer. He was breathtakingly intelligent, yet humble with it, and these twin tensions are evident in both his fiction and non-fiction. I’ve recommended his most recent collection of the latter here as the best way into his work; his explorations of subjects as diverse as lobster eating, Tracy Austin and John McCain’s previous presidential campaign are not for the faint of heart – be prepared for exegis, footnotes and meta-ness of a startling or tedious kind, depending on your view of postmodern tomfoolery. But beneath this, you’ll find a writer of rare insight, wisdom and skill, who will be much missed and long, long read. Rishi Dastidar
A while back there was a debate on our forum about writing on old fashioned typewriters. I’ve gone one step further backwards and have taken to using fountain pens. There’s nothing like real ink for getting your thoughts down on paper (neatly enough to read them afterwards). I’ve even set up the Campaign for Real Ink on Facebook but it could do with a few more members. If you fancy picking up a restored Conway Steward 58 or a Parker Duofold get yourself to The Writing Equipment Society’s annual fair at Kensington Town Hall in Sunday 12th October. I’d go, but I’m off sky diving that day (not from a plane, just over a huge, ex MOD fan pointing upwards). Look up Diamine Ink, the UK’s only remaining manufacturer, the people who make Registrar’s Ink for births, deaths and marriages. Also see a nice man called Brian Barrett and his beautifully reconditioned pens, and tell him I sent you. Sarah McCartney
LEHMAN BROTHERS
Here's a piece of writing about business. It's the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy statement. Makes for sober reading, especially for any writer who has worked in financial services (or has any kind of bank account, loan, pension...). If I've understood it correctly, Citibank is owed $138 billion in bond debt. This is almost beyond the realms of fiction. Tim Rich
PENGUIN WRITER'S HANDBOOK
Stephen Curtis and Martin Manser Penguin, £5.99 list, or £4.79 on Amazon
I’ve recently invested in the whole new Penguin series of books for writers, The Writer’s Handbook is the one I carry around with me. I can’t help wondering if they agonised about where to put the apostrophe. There’s also a guide to Punctuation, a great on one Usage and Abusage, a Rhyming Dictionary, Proverbs, Grammar, English Idioms; I bought the Maths one too. It’s the curved edges that make them irresistible. Sarah McCartney
Joseph O'Connor Vintage, £7.99 list, or £4.86 on Amazon
I was worried about reading this, because I couldn’t imagine it possible that he could improve on The Star of the Sea, but somehow he has. An astonishing novel, told through a mixture of diary, balladry, dozens of different voices, newspaper cuttings and many others, it’s a collage style that has the sort of ventriloquism that David Mitchell has made his own in recent years. Glorious language, amazing storytelling, fantastic reach. It’s got it all. Buy it. Put it to the top of your pile. Read it. Martin Lee
Bill Bryson HarperPerennial, £7.99 list, or £3.86 on Amazon
Didn’t learn much new about the old boy, but this was funny, concise, charmingly written, and neatly dispelled a good few myths. Classic Bryson. If only 'Bard & Co' had sold as many copies. Jim Davies
Luigi Pirandello Gielgud Theatre, London until 8 November
Pirandello wrote this play in 1921, and had to run out of the theatre on opening night to avoid the fight between those in the audience who loved it and those who hated it. In the original play, six characters interrupt a rehearsal and demand to be allowed to tell their story to a theatre company. This production gives a 21st century slant by transforming the theatre company into a tv crew that’s filming a documentary. It explores the boundaries between reality, acting and faking it, and has some breath-taking scenes – particularly the ones with the Beetlejuice-style pimp and the girl and the fish tank. Fiona Thompson
THE 38 MOST COMMON FICTION WRITING MISTAKES (AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)
Jack M Bickham Writer's Digest Books, £9.99 list, or £7.49 on Amazon
Let’s face it, we’re all writing a novel aren’t we? I can’t remember a time from age 18 onwards that I wasn’t writing a novel. I usually decide about 20,000 words in that it’s useless and start another one. Anyway, I’ve been reading a great book by Jack M Bickham called 'The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)'. It’s slim, it’s good and don’t all read it because you might become successful published authors before me and I’ll cry. Sarah McCartney
Michael Gerber HarperCollins, £10.99 list, or £5.94 on Amazon
If you’re thinking about starting a business or have already jumped in, you should read this book. Why do most small businesses fail? Gerber asks. His answer is that we start businesses as technicians - we’re good at the thing we do, so we go and sell that to people. The trouble is that the technician gets so busy doing the do, that they struggle to get their head above water. Sound familiar to anyone? To succeed, businesses also need the manager to put processes like invoicing and debt collection in place, and the entrepreneur to create the vision and to keep reinventing the business. Fortunately you don't need an MBA to get this book - Gerber’s writing is straightforward and entertaining. Ben Afia
The first thing you have to get over is that this is not the British version. It’s more upbeat, the theme music grates, The Tim character is less of a loser, and the Gareth character isn’t quite as good. The first few episodes also follow the UK series quite closely, so it’s bound to pale by comparison. But bear with it. This turns into something wholly removed from the original, but every bit as good. It’s now into its 100th episode and you have to marvel at the mileage they’ve found, introducing new characters and plotlines, and creating a character of surprising depth in Michael Scott (the US David Brent). Great stuff. Nick Asbury
Cormac McCarthy Picador, £7.99 list, or £4.69 on Amazon
Shocking, harrowing, brutal, beautiful and, ultimately, heart-breaking. The characters, nameless as they are, are vivid and true; their connection at once intensely vulnerable and eternally unbreakable. The language is spare, precise and measured - and then unexpectedly lush and lyrical. 'The Road' also reminds us that it is only by sheer luck that we have the wonderful world we still cling to, and that there is no reason we shouldn't lose it tomorrow, if we don't take care. This is a phenomenal read. Mike Reed
Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury £11.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
This book won the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It's the true story of the murder of a three-year-old boy in a country house in 1860. The book draws on historical documents, contemporary books and newspaper reports of the time. It's a mystery that was 'solved' with the involvement of Jonathan Whicher, one of the Metropolitan Police's first-ever detectives. Whicher became something of a literary model for detectives like Mr Bucket in Dickens' Bleak House and Wilkie Collins' Sgt Cuff. The case itself seems like the archetype for most detective fiction ever since, and in Whicher you see Rebus, Morse and others taking shape. Sarah Summerscale tells this story brilliantly. It's a gripping tale of detection, violence, madness, covert sex, that keeps you guessing till the final page. And you feel how unlike and how alike our own times are to the book's Victorian setting. John Simmons
Every year thousands of village shops close. Sometimes it's because they're run by a grumpy old bugger who only stocks luncheon meat, Cherryade and shoe insoles, and seems to prefer talking to his slavering Alsatian than the customers (Hello Mr Jefferys, how are you and Fang?). At other times it's simply because no-one saved it in time. Still, some village shops are now springing back to life, including - perhaps - this one in Sussex. Their business plan is one of the best pieces of business writing I've read this year, and the website isn't half bad. Community copywriting; it's the future. www.rushlakegreenvillageshop.co.uk. Tim Rich
WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS?
John Carey Faber and Faber, £7.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
This is an acerbic, astute and deeply felt exhumation of the arts; what they are for, how we respond to them, why we elevate them, how we perceive them, and why we need / do not need them. John Carey has a forensic intellect that pins back the skin we call culture and plumbs around in the innards of creativity to find out what makes it and us tick. He takes no prisoners and is merciless towards anyone pontificating about the benefits of the arts unless they can make an objective case. He has one of those academic minds I can only totter after, but this book has taken lots of my fatuous assumptions, turned them inside out, and hung them on the line. Tom Lynham
John Mortimer Penguin, £7.99 list or £5.99 on Amazon
In what has been a bit of bumper Penguin buying month for me (hello Great Ideas vol 3), this was my favourite. It is, unbelievably, my first Rumpole - and it's a great introduction to him. His voice is immediate: sharp, clear-eyed, with enough dry wit to prevent sentimentality. The indefegatible cussedness of chambers is evoked well. And the plot, on first glance slight, fair clips along to a surprising ending, with plenty of dramatic witness box revelations. On this evidence, it's odd that the QC isn't as lauded as other fictional detective plodders. Rishi Dastidar
Vilhelm Hammershoi Royal Academy, London, until 7 September 2008
Definitely worth seeing if you get a chance, although it may be too popular for its own good. It’s strange standing in a crowded gallery staring at these paintings of silence, solitude and eerily empty rooms. What’s most striking is the way Hammershoi finds so much inspiration in his own apartment, painting it from every angle and turning it into a universe of its own. Food for thought for anyone who spends most of their days working at home. Nick Asbury
Martin Amis Vintage, £6.99 list or £5.49 on Amazon
This book tells the story – backwards, from death to birth – of a doctor who worked in Nazi concentration camps. Amis does this brilliantly. Weeds are ‘screwed into’ the ground, prostitutes pay pimps, fire creates letters, rain flies upwards, and uniformed men spread rubbish on the streets. As the story moves into the past, the horror is intensified by the naive tone of the narrator – the doctor’s conscience – who marvels at how a father calms a crying baby with a slap and how a shockingly inflamed eyeball is rectified by a single injection. The book is compelling, horrific, thought-provoking. One of the best I’ve ever read. Fiona Thompson
Jonathan Feinberg
Wordle is an intriguing little web site that's certainly worth five minutes of your time. You can create beautiful random 'word clouds', by simply cutting and pasting any short passage of words, and then fine tuning the fonts and colour scheme – the results are then saved to an online gallery. It's like instant concrete poetry with all the effort removed. I tried it with the intro copy from my home page, and it came up with this. You can see a larger version here if you're interested. Otherwise, just go and have a play - happy wordling. www.wordle.net Jim Davies
30,000 YEARS OF ART
Phaidon, £29.99 list, or £19.99 on Amazon
Jaw-droppingly amazing round-up of some of the most amazing things ever made. Every page is a delight - in fact the whole experience leaves you rather lightheaded with wonder. Just make sure your coffee table is suitably reinforced, because this baby is huge. Roger Horberry
Mike Dempsey
Lively new blog from one of Britain's most accomplished and outspoken designers. Some terrifically sharp observations on ideas and language, including a well aimed toe-poke in the groin of the BBC's The Culture Show. http://mikedempsey.typepad.comTim Rich
LUSTIG BOOK JACKETS
Perfect coffee-break browsing; a set of Alvin Lustig-designed book jackets. Not sure about 'Handful of Dust', but I love 'Flowers of Evil' and 'The Man Who Died'. Tim Rich http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictorama/sets/651601/
MARK KERMODE REVIEWS MAMMA MIA
Anyone who tunes into Five Live on a Friday afternoon will already be familiar with Mark Kermode’s film reviews. But I only recently discovered that you can see them all in video form, which adds a whole new dimension to the experience. I particularly recommend watching Simon Mayo’s increasingly desperate physical reactions as Kermode launches into a ten-minute destruction of Pirates of the Caribbean 3. More recently, his impassioned tribute to Mamma Mia reached quite surreal levels. Nick Asbury
Not a handbook for Arctic ‘twitchers’, but a commentary-free compendium of paperback book covers from the 1930s until today. Not surprisingly, the editors have chosen to focus is on work from the Fifties onwards, when the groundbreaking publisher departed from its original tri-part covers, to embrace a more pictorial style. A real treat for visual arts fans, with graphic witticism from the likes of Derek Birdsall and Milton Glaser, and consummate illustration from Alan Aldridge and Andrjez Klimowski. A winning combination of graphic design and social history drip from every page. At last, a book you really can judge by its covers. Jim Davies
Mike Fosbrook The Vault, Edinburgh, 4-14 August, 2.30pm
I love Edinburgh during its August festivals, it buzzes with life. This year I've a particular reason to go up there because I'll be seeing a play called 'Some People Think I'm Odd'. This is a play by my friend Mike Fosbrook who died of cancer six years ago. He was a life-long teacher who had a real passion for the theatre. One of his plays was performed at Scarborough, directed by Alan Ayckbourn. But, inevitably, with his life cut short, Mike's work never reached the widest audience that it might have done.
I saw 'Some People Think I'm Odd' a month ago in Mike's home town Wolverhampton. That was a fundraising performance that achieved its target of getting enough money to take the one-woman play to Edinburgh. I was thrilled, moved and amazed by the play about a very disturbed woman. It's powerful and deserves to be seen. If you're in Edinburgh for the festivals, try and see it.
John Simmons
TELL AN OUTRAGEOUS LIE: 188 LEGAL STIMULANTS TO GET YOUR CREATIVE JUICES FLOWING
Mandy Wheeler and James de Ville Marshall Cavendish, £12 list, or £7.80 on Amazon
Life's too short to stare at an empty page. 'Tell An Outrageous Lie' is a book of beginnings. 188 intriguing, mischievous suggestions to get you writing, drawing, telling stories, making movies, or just staring out of the window and pondering in an interesting way. Produced by writer and 26 member Mandy Wheeler and designer James de Ville, 'Tell An Outrageous Lie' contains no lessons, no research, no acronyms, no tests, no ‘tips’ - just a bunch of ideas and images to give your imagination a shove. It's an invitation to look more closely at the world and to ponder the mass of stories that run through everyday life. It's also an opportunity to consider the consequences of an ill-fated fortune cookie (page 24), to open the Book of Lost Ideas (page 89), and to draft your application letter to the Association of Space Explorers (page 102). And who is it for? For writers and for everyone else. There are no entry requirements for being imaginative, we can all do it. All we need is a little nudge to help us to see things differently. And that's what this book provides.
Jeremy Paxman Penguin, £9.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
In which ‘The Nation’s Grand Inquisitor’ forgoes his sneer – to a degree – and instead takes to the road to try and find out what it is that makes politicians tick, and why they put up with not just questioning from the likes of him, but the loss of dignity, the appalling hours and the inevitable failure at the end of their careers. His answer is more than just a knee-jerk repetition of the word ‘power’. Indeed he turns up the surprising fact that UK prime ministers are more likely than not to have lost a parent early. Paxman is such a fluent and incisive writer, you wonder why he doesn’t take to the pen more often – he would liven up our pages as much as our screens. Rishi Dastidar
Ed Peter Hall and Michael Bierut Princeton Architectural Press, new and used from £28 on Amazon
This incredible book is out of print now, but I'd urge you to track it down. It’s a collection of work by, and snippets of writing about, the late Tibor Kalman, the mercurial founder of the influential New York design consultancy M&Co, who went on to edit the controversial, Benetton-sponsored Colors magazine. Published in 1999, the year Kalman died from cancer, the first few spreads of the book are reminiscent of his work on the magazine – arresting images, culled from all corners of the globe, overlaid with simple, yet profound statements. Curiosities, eye-openers and juxtapositions, all guaranteed to make you think. When you finally put the book down, you’ll see things differently. Jim Davies
Adrian Shaughnessy Resonance 104.4 fm (The Art of Listening) is the world’s first radio art station, established by the London Musicians’ Collective. It features programmes and blogs from musicians, artists and critics who represent the diversity of London’s arts scenes, with regular weekly contributions from nearly two hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists and instigators. A major attraction is Graphic Design on the Radio hosted by 26 member Adrian Shaughnessy, who talks to graphic designers about their work and the music that inspires them.
A quick trawl through the schedules fishes up appearances from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Alemayehu Eshete, Morecambe & Wise, sounds of the Blackburn Monoplane and the 1928 Tram (with Pantograph), early electronic music, reports from the Durham Arts Festival, radiophonia, soundscapes and yarns, Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Signals, and live lunchtime broadcasts from The Foundry – Shoreditch’s most existential bar. Tom Lynham
LAY IT DOWN
Al Green Blue Note, £8.98 on Amazon
Unlike Stevie Wonder’s much-anticipated release last year, this is a fine return to form from the 63-year-old Reverend with the sweetest soul tonsils around. Age has certainly not withered the mighty Al. The production by ?uestlove gives 'Lay It Down' a contemporary edge, and the duets with Anthony Hamilton and Corrine Bailey Rae add a welcome twist, but as usual, Al steals the show with his dreamy, almost ethereal vocal. For chillin’ out after a hard day’s writing, it doesn’t get better than this. Jim Davies
Momus is a songwriter, blogger, former journalist and a truly post-modern artist heavily into otherness. Check out his website for the full Monty.
The London-as-Tokyo Tour is an action by Momus and his Japanese girlfriend Hisae Mizutani in which they'll ply up and down the pedestrian walkways of the South Bank dressed as tour guides, speaking through loudhailers about the buildings and sights as if they were places in Tokyo. Momus gave his first 'Unreliable Tour' in 2006, when he was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial in New York, circulating daily through the galleries giving invented (and often absurd) accounts of the art on show. During Hide and Seek, Momus and Mizutani will transform London into Tokyo - a city they both know well - using nothing more than language and the collective power of imagination. Tom Lynham
PLENTY O' PODCASTS
This month it appears that I haven’t been doing any reading. Instead I have been mostly dipping my toes into podcast waters, and there’s plenty to catch out there. I’ve become faintly unhinged by the consistently wry amusement offered by the Guardian’s Football podcast, especially now that it’s on tour for Euro 2008. Satirists Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver’s ‘The Bugle’, under the auspices of The Times, is ‘an audio newspaper for a visual world’. It is unhinged, and makes me faint with laughter.
Definitely not unhinged are the fine video podcasts from Monocle. These provide some behind the scenes colour and extended interviews from the magazine’s features, and cover a wide scope – from the future of news to trans-Persian railway journeys. And speaking of wide scope, the musical breadth covered in the podcasts from legendary London club Fabric is, well, breathtaking.
You can subscribe to all of these through iTunes Music Store. What are you waiting for? Rishi Dastidar
THE DRAGON AND THE ELEPHANT: CHINA, INDIA, AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
David Smith Profile Books, £8.99 or £5.39 on Amazon
Excellent overview of the growth of India and China by David Smith, Economics Editor of The Sunday Times, London. Balanced, engaging, insightful, often surprising; this is a helpful indication of what super-growth in Asia means – for us in the UK, for China and India, and for the world. You can also read David Smith's blog here. Tim Rich
THE ENEMIES OF PROGRESS: DANGERS OF SUSTAINABILITY
Austin Williams Societas, £8.95 or £8.49 on Amazon
Brilliant riposte to unthinking environmentalism that suggests the sacred cow of sustainability produces bullshit as well as, er, milk. This is the sort of entertaining and illuminating polemic that makes you think again – sharper. As me-too sustainability 'commitments' spread through business, this is a hugely useful challenge to complacent and unprogressive thinking. You can read more articles by Austin Williams here.Tim Rich
Kazuo Ishiguro Faber & Faber, £7.99 or £4.99 on Amazon
Utterly lovely. So understated, tender and beautifully paced (although at times the pacing is almost too stately - it opens with a 40-page discussion of the finer points of butlering). The way Ishiguro handles the story and the sadness within it is masterly. Miles away from the punchy, masculine prose I normally like, but so well written I'm prepared to forgive the lack of swearing and shootouts. Roger Horberry
I’ve probably recommended this before, so humour me if I have, but you just have to check out Visual Thesaurus. It’s strangely wonderful watching the words rearrange themselves on the page as you click on different word nodes. The downside? You only get a limited number of free tries before you have to pay up. But by then, you might be hooked. Martin Lee
A HANDFUL OF HONEY: AWAY TO THE PALM GROVES OF MOROCCO AND ALGERIA
by Annie Hawes Pan, £7.99 list, or £5.59 on Amazon
Annie Hawes is best known for 'Extra Virgin', a revealing and entertaining account of starting a new life among the olive groves of Liguria. There are tales of failed harvests, local delicacies and idiosyncratic characters, but 'Extra Virgin' and its two Italian follow-ups also offered sharp political and social insight way beyond others in this genre. 'A Handful of Honey' oozes with the same qualities, taking readers on a serpentine wander through north Africa. You encounter djinns, festivals, pigeon pie and desert vultures, but again it's Hawes’ ability to move between the personal and the political - particularly the effects of European colonialism and radical Islam on people's lives - that sets this book apart. Terrific summer reading. Tim Rich
Jose Saramago (translated by Giovanni Pontiero) Vintage Classics, £7.99 list, or Amazon from £5.99
In the weeks of bedtime reading, the plots of my dreams became riddled with blindness. It’s that kind of book - haunting, mesmerising, disturbing, fascinating. The story is set in Anycity, Anywhere and the central characters have no names - only labels. The blindness descends on the earth as a virus spread by eye contact. The first victims to be infected are rounded up, quarantined in a disused army camp patrolled by armed guards with orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. We follow their confusion, bewilderment and descent into depravity as they are forced to come to terms with blindness without medical care or supervision. It is a heartbreaking allegory of segregation, victimisation, torture, survival and how rapidly, stripped of self-esteem we lose our civilisation. Saramago evokes parallels of blindness through the structure of the language. We are relentlessly disoriented by walls of treacly text, minimal punctuation and lack of speech marks. Tenses change from line to line, sentences roll over pages, and the narrator is an indeterminable shifting presence that orchestrates and stage directs the characters with a remote impassivity. Still shivering from it. Tom Lynham
If you are looking for five minutes of fun distraction from work, and let’s face it, you know full well that you are, you could do far worse than clicking through on to
www.brandtags.net
Brand tags is a simple idea, and an elegantly designed site, based on how people tag brands online. It gives you a type of brand lexicon or thesaurus, but with far more vigour and diversity than you’d ever normally get. For my money, the best way to use it is to try and guess the brand, based on the tags. Harder than it intuitively feels it should be. Martin Lee
DRIVING OVER LEMONS
Chris Stewart Sort of Books, £6.999 list, or £4.99 on Amazon
Chris Stewart writes lyrically and wittily about his foolhardy attempt to move to a farm in the Alpujarras mountains of Southern Spain on a piece of land that has no access, no running water and no electricity. He discovers authentic peasant food – potatoes and peppers stirred with sticks and a burnt chicken’s head for breakfast, learns how to build bridges over rivers and watches pigs getting killed. However, he doesn’t fall into the trap of patronising the local people, and casts a wry eye over the many other ex-pats in the area, including a couple whom the locals refer to as ‘those two Englishwomen’, thanks to the man’s long flowing hair. Fiona Thompson
Simon Armitage Viking, £16.99 list, or £11.89 on Amazon
Thoroughly absorbing and entertaining read from Britain's next Poet Laureate (which hopefully won't be a career destroyer). The book weaves together tales of gigs Armitage has been to over the years (everything from The Fall to Simply Red), along with various recollections of his own poetry readings, which are often laugh-out-loud funny. (Unfortunately, the gig he did for 26 a few years back doesn't get a mention...) It all ties in with Armitage's belief that poetry and song were once the same thing, and may well become the same thing again in future - and he makes a compelling case. Nick Asbury
My slightly twisted sense of humour is often drawn to ‘I can has cheeseburger’ blog. It has it’s own unique tone of voice which I like a lot. Domestic pets are the stars of the show on cheezburger, but there’s also some good political stuff on punditkitchen. Go visit both. Here's an image that may whet your appetite. John Fountain
JOHN COOPER CLARKE
on tour
I caught the Bard of Manchester on his latest tour at the Union Chapel, Islington. After education at a dead-end school (“We had our own coroner”) in Salford during the 1960s, JCC launched his stand-up poet career as warm-up man for the Pistols and the Clash as they gobbed their way to fame. Owner of the thinnest legs in show-biz he ricochets around the stage like a string puppet, gulping drinks from various glasses and spraying the mike with reflective giggles. His shambolic delivery of splattery vocabulary while fumbling with dog-eared exercise books is delightful in this age of slick media presenters. Rejected by the snobby poetry establishment for his fuck-you attitude and jibes at intellectual pomposity, he happily made Sugar Puffs adverts while living with Nico from Velvet Underground. His Dada music hall act has been going in and out of style for decades but has influenced many musicians from Joy Division to the Buzzcocks, and more recently mentoring the Arctic Monkeys. His scathing polemics and rambling discourses (on Mary Shelley and 101 ways to kill a vampire in a Jimmy Savile accent) are riddled with wonderful jokes, all the funnier for the self-deprecating throwaway delivery… “If it wasn't for Emmerdale I wouldn't get any fresh air at all.” Watch out for appearances at the summer festivals. www.johncooperclarke.com Tom Lynham
KILL YOUR FRIENDS
John Niven William Heinemann, £12.99 list, or £9.09 on Amazon
In which the devil runs rampage through London’s music industry, in the disguise of depraved A&R man Steven Stelfox, destined to be mentioned in the same breath as Patrick Bateman. Niven has drawn on his years in the business to produce a scabrous and scathing satire, damning punters, wannabes and execs alike. It is at points wildly implausible. But the detail of the backstabbing, the nihilism and the ferocious consumption have the ring of truth as well a deep, black comedy. Rishi Dastidar
Jack Kerouac Penguin Classics, £6.24 and £5.99 both on Amazon
Two takes on the wild beatnik crazyness of 1950s America. Both heavily autobiographical and - let's be honest - showing their age a little, but hugely enjoyable in all their unselfishness enthusiasm and naivity. If you've seen The Comic Strip's 'The Beat Generation' then you know what to expect. Like, dig it, man. Roger Horberry
This has very little (OK nothing) to do with writing. But I thought I’d share it with you anyway, because it’s so funking good. In fact, it’s putting a sizeable hole in my bank balance, as I feel compelled to buy virtually every other track CC pulls out of his awesome ‘trunk of funk’. Apart from the glorious playlist and good-natured interviews with artists old and new, the love and enthusiasm for the genre comes over loud and strong. And the show is trainspotterish enough to name-check every song, artist and label. Jim Davies
THE TIN DRUM
Gunter Grass Vintage, £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
Spurred by a working trip to Gdansk the other week I've been rereading Gunter Grass. I first read 'The Tin Drum', 'Dog Years' and 'Cat and Mouse' in the late 60s - so that time was not all about love and peace and flowers in your hair. Grass's novels are set in the period around the second world war, drawing on his own experiences of growing up in the time of Hitler. Grass lived in what was then called Danzig, now Gdansk, effectively a German colony in northern Poland.
'The Tin Drum' in particular is a book that stays forever in your mind. Veering between the disturbingly real and surreal, its main character is a boy who never grows bigger than a three-year-old and who communicates only by playing a tin drum, commenting on the rise and fall of Hitler. It's full of vivid writing, great set-pieces, riveting events: it helps you to understand an essential part of recent history that we need to understand and remember. If you haven't read it, you must: one of the great books of the 20th century. John Simmons
Contentious I know... but perfect for just turning off and tuning out. Sickly sweet American pap with a rotten underbelly, and more compelling than it should be. The writing’s good, at times superb. Bree to her daughter: ‘Where on earth did you get skates in a convent?’ Danielle: ‘I borrowed them from one of the eating-disorder girls. They have all the good exercise equipment.’ Heather Atchison
DON'T MAKE ME THINK!: A COMMON SENSE APPROACH TO WEB USABILITY
Steve Krug New Riders, £24.99 list or £19.99 on Amazon
Steve Krug calls his take on web usability ‘advanced common sense’. And he had the sense to write a nice short book (the quickest read was on a two-hour plane ride apparently). It’s well-written and energetic, with some straightforward advice on web design. On words, he suggests using as few as possible because we scan web pages rather than reading them. Good advice for clients who want to say it all. Ben Afia
The author of 'The Year of Magical Thinking' is talking at the National Theatre on 25 April, and the play of her memoir runs on dates in late April and May at the same venue. You can hear a brief podcast of a Southbank Show interview with her here, and there's more on her remarkable memoir here. Tim Rich
KELLAWAY ON RADIO
Patron Saint of Jargonbusting Lucy Kellaway discusses business verbiage on National Public Radio. Tim Rich
ONCE
directed by John Carney Icon Home Entertainment, £11.98
I've just finished watching this low-budget Irish film on DVD and absolutely loved it, more than any film I can think of in recent years. I even watched the director's commentary straight after watching the film. It's set in Dublin and is filled with songs written and performed by the two main actors/characters. It's a musical but not in a Fred and Ginger kind of way. A very simple story about a young man who's a busker on the streets. He writes and sings his own songs but only performs them at night when the streets are empty. A young woman from the Czech Republic meets him and likes his music. They get to know each other through the songs they each write. It's all very beautiful in its simplicity, a sad film that made me feel good. John Simmons Buy from Amazon: 'Once'
THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY
Ken Dornstein Sceptre, list £7.77, or £5.99 on Amazon
Ken’s older brother, David, desperately wants to be a writer. He stays up all night bashing away at an old typewriter, amasses huge piles of ideas and half-finished stories, goes to creative writing classes, and writes letters to Norman Mailer. Then he dies in the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December 1988. Ken tries to come to terms with David’s death by trawling through his brother’s papers, hoping to find evidence of the Great Unpublished American Novel, and instead finds eerie premonitions about dying in a plane crash. This is a moving memoir about death, grief and becoming a writer. Fiona Thompson
Iona and Peter Opie New York Review of Books Classics, £10.99 list, or Amazon from £7.14
Iona and Peter Opie devoted their lives to the street culture and folklore of childhood. They collected children’s oral and written literature from schools all over the UK, and this book originally published in 1960 fizzes with the scuffed shoes, bruised knees and peer group pressures I still vividly remember. It’s a salutary reminder of the fearless, irreverent and infectious creativity of the playground and colourful regional dialects. The index reads like something out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: retribution, truces, spitting jokes, tongue twisters, ghoulism, inflicting pain, self-incrimination, fatties versus skinnies, sending away, tortures, levitation, initiation rights, tooth fairies, love tokens, hair pulling, torments, opposite sex, bigotry and bastardised nursery rhymes…
Mary had a little lamb
Her father shot it dead
And now it goes to school with her
Between two chunks of bread
Leo Rosten (revised by Lawrence Bush) Three Rivers Press, $18.95 list or Amazon from £11.73
Dr Jonathan Miller declared in Beyond the Fringe that he was not a Jew, but Jew-ish. Well 'The Joys of Yiddish', first published in 1908, is no musty academic treatise, but a fascinating car crash of Yingl-ish and Amerid-ish. This new edition sparkles with audacious stories, mischievous anecdotes and linguistic gymnastics that show how subtly shaded inflection, emphasis and nuance can transform a benign sentence into a loaded polemic. You don’t have to be remotely Jew-ish to roar with laughter, and will never look at any ‘Engl-ish’ word with quite the same innocence again.
A woman began to beat her shmendrik of a husband who crawled under the bed.
“Come out!” she cried.
“No!” he said. “I’ll show you who’s the boss in this house!”
THE PEEL SESSIONS: A STORY OF TEENAGE DREAMS AND ONE MAN'S LOVE OF NEW MUSIC
Ken Garner BBC Books, £19.99 list or £13.99 on Amazon
Yes, yes, I know - pure fanboy geekery. Lots of lovely lists about every session ever recorded for the Peel show. Basically it's more detail than you can shake a stick at, and includes endless anecdotes that give an insight into the world of the Greatest DJ Who Ever Lived™. Brilliant loo book. Roger Horberry
Given that the topic 'Which typeface do you use when writing?' on the 26.org.uk message board has been viewed around 1,300 times, I'm guessing that some 26ers will enjoy 'The Rather Difficult Font Game' by Kari Pätilä. Perfect sandwich-at-your-desk entertainment. I did a lot of guessing and scored a pathetic 14. Tim Rich
THE SEPARATION
Christopher Priest Gollancz, £7.99 list, or £5.19 on Amazon
Priest is not only one of the UK’s best science fiction novelists; he has also been garlanded as one of the best literary writers too. For those of you who are familiar with his themes of double, intertwining lives through the film adaptation of ‘The Prestige’, ‘The Separation’ is an excellent continuation. This time the action is set in 1941, and
the story of the Sawyer twins unwinds into a plausible counterfactual history of WWII. Priest’s writing is spare, and the worlds he creates are always compelling. Rishi Dastidar Buy from Amazon: 'The Separation'
THREE USES OF THE KNIFE
David Mamet Methuen, £9.99 list or Amazon from £6
This three-act essay on the nature of dramatic structure plunges from the banal to the brilliant, but the good stuff is so special I can forgive the rest. In the first chapter Mamet discusses the meaning of drama, the nature of theatre and generic structures. The second chapter explores ‘middle-ness’ and how to keep an audience awake without the novelty of the first act or the denouement of the third. It raises the problem of the notoriously difficult ‘second act’ and touches on superego and self-censorship. Chapter three confronts ‘thirdness’ and the wilting enthusiasm of dramatist and protagonist at this point in a plot. The book is scuppered by repetitions and afterthoughts, and screams for a good editor, but it’s stuffed with provocative teasers. I bought it after seeing Mamet’s Speed the Plough at the Old Vic. This dazzling study of art versus money in which two Hollywood megalomaniacs cha-cha their towards mutual destruction is brilliant… but um… goes a bit pear-shaped in the middle. Tom Lynham
In which Carey becomes the voice of the Outback’s most famous son and outlaw and tells of his suffering under a distant father his bondage to a famous bush ranger the development of his skills as a rider and thief his burning sense of injustice as the English establishment go after his kith and kin the way he imprints himself on a young nation’s psyche before his glorious desolate end it is an amazing feat of recreation a
thrilling tale with heart and verve and all without any commas or swearing in the text. Rishi Dastidar Buy from Amazon: 'True History of The Kelly Gang'
BLACK INGRATITUDE
Brilliant novelist Paul Bailey offers a revealing consideration of Pip, from Dickens’ Great Expectations, in this article from The Guardian. A fine example of a writer finding common ground with a character. Tim Rich
Volume two of James’ travails finds him fresh off the boat at Southampton, and then desperately trying to avoid living in Earls Court, avoid working and avoid ex-girlfriends. All the tropes of bachelor living are here: eye-wateringly bad diets, nosey landladies, all blotted out by much booze. The jokes are in fine order, the sixties are starting to swing, and most startlingly of all, some self-awareness is starting to crack Clive’s carapace. And there’s some wise advice too: “Think twice before you get mixed up with a writer, and ten times before you marry one. Writers want things to be over, so that they can write the elegy.” Rishi Dastidar
This blog, by an anonymous paramedic, tells tales of life (and death) on the ambulances. It's written with real drama, and often with enormous tenderness and compassion for those to whose aid he goes. He's also frequently furious about the knots that the 'system' ties everyone up in. (I love the name, too.) I've been meaning to recommend this one for a while, but tonight's post was the one that made me spring into action. It's just heartbreaking. Read it at http://tinyurl.com/yrr9rc Mike Reed
THE HISTORY MAN
Malcolm Bradbury Picador, £7.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
Bit of an oldie, but new to me. For anyone similarly ignorant, The History Man is a satire of 1970s academia that focuses on the comings and goings (mainly comings) of the so-called radical movement, the remnants of whom I came into contact with during my time at uni the 80s. All big 'tashes and Che tee shirts. It quite took me back. In fact it's enough to make you vote Tory. Well, almost. Roger Horberry
Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, £12.99 or £7.74 on Amazon
Controversial, polemical, up for the fight… in some senses, there’s no one better than Amis to plunge headfirst into the most pressing political issues of the age. The title of this collection of fiction, reviews and essays since 11 September 2001 refers to “the defining moment”, when America “had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.” There is, of course, verve and a dark wit to be found here, as well as some illumination. But there’s also a notion that writing in anger doesn’t necessarily lead to a greater understanding. Which we could all do with right now. Rishi Dastidar
The dramatic heart of this book lies in Nelson’s distinctly unheroic behaviour during the Neapolitan Republican uprising in 1799, when he oversaw the execution of hundreds of ‘rebels’, and hanged the much-loved Admiral Caracciolo and threw his body into the harbour.
The story starts, though, as Sir William Hamilton goes back to Naples from London to carry on his work as British Ambassador. His wife - the reserved, refined Catherine - plays the piano in the Neapolitan palazzo while Hamilton is out shooting wild boar with the bloodthirsty king, climbing his beloved Vesuvius, or adding to his vast collection of rocks, minerals, vases and paintings. When Catherine dies, Hamilton is seduced by his nephew’s young mistress, Emma Hamilton. Emma is exuberant, beautiful and vulgar, the opposite of Catherine. And we all know what happens when Emma meets Nelson.
Many phrases stick in the mind. ‘To travel is to shop. To travel is to loot.’ ‘The first principle of the science of felicity is not to succumb to indignation or self-pity.’ This is a fascinating and beautiful book, where Sontag contemplates the strange mind of the collector, the power of beauty, and how success can go to a person’s head. Fiona Thompson
Joshua Ferris’s sharp, wry novel follows the lives, loves and departmental meetings of a troupe of copywriters, art directors and project managers in an ad agency in Chicago. Beneath the deftly delivered wit is a rich portrayal of character and place. Also remarkable are the reviews on amazon.co.uk. Having spent the day talking to people about “putting the reader at the centre of your writing” I read these and felt somewhat homicidal on Joshua Ferris’s behalf. Tim Rich
The next time you feel overwhelmed by the consumerist/marketing/branding whirlwind we all live (and work) in, check out Adbusters. It’s a hotbed of capitalist sabotage – full of articles, spoof ads and videos all aimed at exposing how big media controls America and those who follow in her footsteps. This may sound heavy, but a healthy dose of humour gives it heart. It’s based – where else – in Canada, and they publish a magazine that you just might spot in Borders if you’re lucky. Heather Atchison
ASHES TO ASHES
Thursdays 9.00pm, BBC One
Though I’m missing the powerful intensity of John Sim as DI Sam Tyler, the new time-shift cop drama from the makers of 'Life on Mars' is still must-see TV. This time, DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) has transported to 1980s London after a horrific accident, and finds herself working for old-school copper Gene Hunt (the always watchable Philip Glenister). Funny, evocative and slyly observed, the Eighties is affectionately lampooned to a glorious to a soundtrack of Adam Ant, Roxy Music and The Human League. You might think the central conceit is too flimsy to stand a sequel, but it’s cleverly written, cracking stuff. Jim Davies
EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU: HOW POPULAR CULTURE IS MAKING US SMARTER
Steven Johnson Penguin, £8.99 or £6.99 on Amazon
I never bought the argument that popular TV shows and the faster flow of TV and computer games was somehow dumbing us down (apart from the ITV news, of course). This book explains why, explaining how shows like The Sopranos and 24 make much greater demands on our attention and interpretative skills than their predecessors. Thought provoking section on the difference between games and stories. Johnson is a rich thinker on (new) media and reading; see stevenberlinjohnson.com for an informed and entertaining look at how people read. Tim Rich
Jonathan Safran Foer Penguin, £7.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
What a moving story. Boy loses father in Twin Towers attack and struggles to come to terms with everything. It could so easily be either sick making or teary but somehow it manages to be funny and life affirming instead. And very, very moving. Roger Horberry
I had supper the other night with Mark Hansen who works with Ben Rubin of Ear Studios in New York. We were celebrating the launch of Listening Post, a fantastic collision of words and the Internet just installed at the Science Museum, London. It’s the result of a remarkable creative partnership. Mark is a mathematician and statistician at Bell Laboratories. His research concerns methods for data-rich applications, especially those arising in telecommunications networks. His work is interdisciplinary, drawing from numerical analysis, signal processing and information theory. Ben is a media artist who has collaborated with performers including Laurie Anderson, Diller+Scofidio, Ann Hamilton, Arto Lindsay, Steve Reich, and Beryl Korot.
Listening Post collects text fragments from Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of two hundred small electronic screens. It cycles through a series of movements, with different arrangements of visual, aural and musical elements, each with its own data-processing logic.
The exhibition is situated in a darkened room perched above the cavernous space of the museum. Letters and words blip at you, sometimes in random movements, other times in stuttering fragments of phrases that suggest more than they ever say. Then out of the chaos comes an order of sorts: patterns and codas that send your head spinning from one side of the display to the other, struggling to make connections. For all its electronic jaggedness and dazzling immediacy, it is incredibly sensual, like flocks of starlings cascading across the sky or waves breaking on a shingle beach. I am a great fan of deconstructing language. So many of our clients are stuck in terminal patterns of rotten communications that do nothing to galvanise what they have to say, or inspire their audiences. I would love to sit them down in front of Listening Post and hope that they have some kind of born-again experience, in which they begin to see language as the glittering star dust that makes magical connections, as opposed to an in-bred, cliché ridden, dysfunctional mongrel pissing on lamp posts to mark out its territories. Tom Lynham
RARE & UNRELEASED RECORDINGS FROM THE GOLDEN REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF SOUL
Aretha Franklin Rhino, £12.48 on Amazon
An extraordinary two-CD collection of rarities, demos outtakes from the mighty Aretha. The rawness of some of the arrangements only emphasises the sheer power and soufulness of her sublime voice. Stripped down, with little or no embellishment, this is spine-tingling, soul-searching music, and goes to prove that it’s not only words that are powerful, but the way they are delivered. Jim Davies
The great thing about this is Alain de Botton's belief that big thinkers can be usefully applied to the problems we face in everyday life. It's not simply learning to be acquired by those with a school-masterish ambition to know it all; it's actually a way of thinking that can (and should) enable everyone to live their lives more happily, in a more fulfilling way. De Botton looks to Socrates when seeking consolation for unpopularity, Nietzsche when seeking consolation for difficulties, and so on. This seemed to capture his democratic approach to language and ideas, which will probably chime for other 26ers the next time you're talking to a corporate-speaking client: "...writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence." James Hogwood
Paul Durcan Harvill Secker, £12 or £7.92 on Amazon
I've loved Paul Durcan's poetry for many years. It's accessible, moving, makes you laugh and cry. I once heard him reading his poetry on tape and now I always hear his Irish voice when I read his poetry on the page. He has a wonderfully conversational tone that can still be lyrical.
This latest collection has a sequence of poems about his mother, following her death a couple of years ago. If you read only half this collection, start with these poems that make up the second half of the book. They become a narrative of emotional memories that invade your own memories. In my case they had me weeping on the tube as I read them. Not a pretty sight but I felt much better afterwards. Recommended to any of you who have ever had a mother. John Simmons
More insightful personal interviews with some of the finest and most high profile writers, from Graham Greene to Stephen King. Very interesting section in the Peter Carey interview on his work as a copywriter. Worth the cover price for the brilliance of Larkin. INTERVIEWER: How did you arrive upon the image of a toad for work or labor? LARKIN: Sheer genius. Tim Rich
There is a simple way to identify a real writer, of course. Ask him or her for an opinion on PG Wodehouse. Anyone who voices a negative view on 'The Master' can be dismissed at a stroke, and should really be stood up against the wall and subjected to a salvo of Drones Club bread rolls. Those confessing an ignorance of Wooster, Jeeves, Psmith, et al should, of course, be given the support their disability deserves. Before being allowed to write another word, they should be supplied with a comfortable chair, a good reading lamp and a hefty injection of Blandings adventures.
This is the sort of devotion Wodehouse's work inspires. Robert McCrum is clearly a devotee. His knowledge of, and affection for, Wodehouse's works shines through this biography. But he's also clear-eyed and unsentimental about his subject.
Wodehouse is revealed as, more than anything, a true artist. He was entirely in the grip of his vision, producing his unique combination of tortuously elaborate yet feather-light adventures of Elysian Edwardian England even while detained at a Nazi internment camp. But he also comes across as an extraordinarily shy and gentle soul: the epitome of amiability but always ultimately opaque to all but a very few. McCrum charts Wodehouse's extraordinary emotional reserve back to a Victorian childhood spent almost entirely separated from his Imperial parents, enormously distant both geographically and emotionally.
Inevitably, McCrum has to tackle the controversy of the broadcasts Wodehouse made from Nazi Germany, which led some to brand him a traitor. McCrum makes a compelling case for the defence (as Orwell and others did before him), showing how these two aspects of Wodehouse – all-encompassing devotion to work, and a uniquely unpolitical and naive character – made him an easy subject for German manipulation. He clearly had no idea how the broadcasts would be received, or that he was being used for propaganda. McCrum doesn't shy from describing this as monumentally stupid, but clearly shows that monumental stupidity was the worst Wodehouse can be accused of.
This is a terrific read, and fascinating for anyone who loves Wodehouse's stories. There's always the worry that too much knowledge of the writer might somehow sully the purity of the work. In Wodehouse's case, knowing him better only adds to the joy. Indeed, McCrum's portrait is so vivid, and the Wodehouse he reveals is so charming, that I began to feel genuinely emotional as the end of the book drew near, knowing of course that there could only be one end. But then, when you've written books like his, death is meaningless: immortality is assured. Mike Reed
The Guardian
All week the Guardian has been giving free booklets of 'Classical Myths' - retellings of mainly ancient Greek stories. We're all more or less familiar with them, and some have entered our world in new ways (particularly with Freudian analysis, eg Oedipus). But it's been a joy to read them and to be stirred again by the power of great, fundamental stories. My personal favourite was the story of Narcissus and Echo that works on so many different levels.
John Simmons
DIGGING TO AMERICA
Anne Tyler Vintage, £7.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
'The Amateur Marriage' got me started on Anne Tyler and 'Digging to America', her latest novel, will keep me going! While my discovery might be considered a little overdue, the prospect of going back through her works is delicious – if these novels are anything to go by…
'Digging to America' tells the story of two Korean babies adopted by two families in America – Americans, Brad and Bitsy, and Iranians, Ziba and Sami; Anne Tyler tells the story of different cultures, family relationships and time. The combination? An addictive read which has the humour and bittersweet poignancy which I am beginning to associate with Tyler’s distinctive style.
Despite concentrating on a select group of individuals and their unique story – or stories – Tyler masterfully spans the years and portrays characters, cultures and emotions which have relevance and resonance to many readers. Melissa Wolfe
If you’re into doing your bit to save the planet, then you’ll be interested from the point of view of how all of us taking small steps can make a collective difference, but even if you’re perfectly happy for the world to accelerate towards environmental meltdown, it’s still worth looking at from the perspective of tone of voice alone. They’ve found a relaxed and intimate way of communicating, and carried it all the way through. Even the terms and conditions have been given thought and attention. Martin Lee www.dothegreenthing.com
FOYLE'S PHILAVERY
Christopher Foyle Chambers, £9.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
Christopher Foyle - he of Foyle's bookshop fame - has put together a treasury of unusual words and been bold enough to invent his very own term to describe the collection, hence why the reader might not recognise the word philavery. Mr Foyle defines it as 'an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words' and the criteria for inclusion are broad. It's the kind of book that is a sheer joy to open at random, offering up such delights as battology - an excessive and pointless repetition of words in speaking or writing (not something that would ever apply to 26 members I'm sure), dontopedalogy, the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it (apparently coined by the Duke of Edinburgh to describe his tendency to make faux pas) and guttle, to eat greedily or gorge.
Another appealing aspect of Foyle's Philavery is the beautiful binding, which for me perfectly illustrates why the e-book will never be quite the same as holding the real thing in your hands. Origins and histories of the words included are sporadic, but it's fascinating enough to inspire you to start a philavery of your own and is worth a read to see how often you can pep up a mundane piece of copy by dropping something different in. That and the satisfaction that comes from irritating people with your constant repetition of "Oooh, listen to this one...". By Boxing Day, my nearest and dearest were desperately searching for the receipt so they could return the book just to shut me up. And if that isn't a recommendation then I'm not sure what is! Amanda Folkes
Alison Bechdel Jonathan Cape, £12.99 list, or £9.09 on Amazon
Ever read a graphic novel? Try 'Fun Home' and lose any preconceptions you might have. The title refers to the funeral home where author Alison Bechdel grew up, and the underlying story is about her coming to terms with her father’s death. A bleakly hilarious, gothic memoir, Fun Home covers everything from her experience of coming out as a lesbian, to her understanding of Proust and James Joyce. And all in comic book form. Lu Hersey
David Allen Piatkus Books, £10.99 list, or £7.14 on Amazon
Your brain isn’t that good at keeping track of everything that’s on your mind. It takes lots of energy to keep it all churning round up there. So GTD’s big idea is - get every last thing into a trusted system, outside your head, and you’ll be both relaxed and in control. The book explains how to put your system together. And the lovely thing is that you can do it any way you want. I love gadgets so it’s all in my BlackBerry. But a beautiful Moleskine notebook and fountain pen are just as valid if that’s your thing. And unlike other time management stuff it actually works… I do feel strangely relaxed.
Ben Afia
Ted Hughes and Christopher Reid Faber & Faber, £30 list, or £14.99 on Amazon
Is your prose jaded, tired and suffering from post-Christmas bloat? Then try a page of two a day of the 'Letters of Ted Hughes'. Books of letters are usually only of interest to completists and fanatics. But a Hughes letter is a linguistic workout as invigorating as a round in the gym. He is incapable of writing a dud line or sentence, bringing the same tautness and intensity of his verse to ordinary thank-you letters. The result is extraordinary, making everything else seem faded and wimpish around it. For an injection of linguistic energy, and proof of the charge that direct, bold expression can carry, look no further. Simon Caulkin
Peter Ackroyd Vintage, £14.99 list, or £10.49 on Amazon
Being a detailed dissection of every aspect of the capital from prehistoric times to (almost) the present day. Utterly engrossing and endlessly interesting, it's the result of a lifetime's research - in fact the range of sources and the skill with which he weaves them together just knocks your socks off. Despite its size 'London' is surprisingly dippable, organised as it is by theme rather than chronology. Not suitable for professional northerners.
Roger Horberry
Translated by Ciaran Carson Granta, available on Amazon Marketplace from £11.06
Winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize.
Just back from an extended stay in Florence. The reason for going was partly to escape the British Christmas, but also to visit the city that drove Dante to write the Divine Comedy. One of the many thrills has been discovering how one work can be interpreted in so many ways by different people over the centuries. One of the translations that is still making me itch is Ciaran Carson’s version of the Inferno published in 2006.
In the doing of it, Ciaran found extraordinary parallels between the warring factions of 21st century Belfast and the bi-polar schisms that tore 14th-century Florence apart. He talks of walking through his neighbourhood on one of Belfast’s sectarian fault lines when hunting for rhymes or trying to interpret a phrase. He wonders if by some Dantean leap of the imagination that a loyalist enclave on an embankment could be seen as a Tuscan village. The propaganda frescos on the walls of pebble-dashed council estates bear similar sinister insignia to the emblems of Florentine families in Santa Croche and Piazza della Signora. A British Army surveillance helicopter overhead reminds Ciaran of Dante flying bareback on Geryon - the half-man, half-scorpion winged monster.
‘Looking down into the darkness of that place in Hell called Malebolge Rings of ditches, moats, trenches, fosses/ military barriers on every side I see a map of North Belfast, its no-go zones and tattered flags, the blackened side-streets, cul-de-sacs and bits of wasteland stitched together by dividing walls and fences.’
Walking on the flagstones of the streets that Dante walked on. Standing on the battlements of the city that forbade the exiled Dante to enter. Reading Dante’s words from a green hill far away as the sun set over the glowing pantiles evaporated the distance of time and space. One of the things I always bang on about with clients is going to source. Listen to the people who work for you. Listen to the customers who love you. Listen to the competition who hate you. Ask the questions you don’t want answers to. Listen to the way people really talk using vulgar dialect, humour, allegory and metaphor.
You will discover stories of such surprise and serendipity, you just can’t make them up. And told in a language that is not cloned, homogenised and neutered, but bursts at the seams with an astonishing authority and authenticity.
Tom Lynham
LAWRENCE WRIGHT Penguin, £8.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
Not the most cheering of reads, but Wright's account of how al-Qaeda developed, both intellectually and politically, is riveting. He traces the Egyptian roots of the organisation, the dealings of the bin Laden family and how enmeshed it is with the Saudi elite, and on the other side, highlights the few lone guns in the US security services who tried to alert their colleagues to the danger before it was too late. As befits a staff writer for 'The New Yorker', every fact is footnoted and the prose reads like a dream - a gripping thriller which, alas, is all too real. Rishi Dastidar
Peter Carey Faber & Faber, £7.99 list, or £3.99 on Amazon
This is a gorgeously raw, funny story about artist Butcher Bones and his ‘damaged 220lb brother’, Hugh. Hugh is not to be trusted with knives or electrical switches and has hair that looks ‘like cattle had been eating it’. The action bounces from rural Australia to Tokyo to New York, as the brothers become embroiled with the enigmatic Marlene and an art theft trail. The language is lovely. Hugh is prone to outbursts of capital letters and butchery-related metaphors (“that ripped up my sausage casings”), and swiftly proves that he is far from the idiot brother he initially appears to be. Fiona Thompson
You've probably seen the film so you pretty much know what to expect - angst, black humour, lots of fighting and er, soap. It's Palahniuk's lean and wiry writing that does it for me - he effortlessly packs an unfeasibly large number of ideas into an unfeasibly small number of words. Toxic satire at its best - riveting, funny and disturbing in equal measure. Roger Horberry
Roberto Saviano Macmillan, £16.99 or £11.21 on Amazon
Roberto Saviano grew up in Secondigliano, an area of Naples renowned for its connections with the local mafia, the Camorra. In this book, the 28 year old journalist gets behind the ‘Godfather glamour’ of the mafia and describes the reality of what is known as ‘the System’. Organised crime accounts for 7% of Italy’s GDP, and the Camorra is up to its armpits in the drugs, cement, industrial waste and construction businesses. A few of the anecdotes are a bit suspect; for example, was the author really standing by in a wasteland as clan members tested out drugs on local addicts? But Gomorrah has sold 600,000 copies in Italy, been hailed by the New York Times as an ‘important book’ and Saviano certainly deserves kudos for his bravery in speaking out. (The English translation comes out on 18 January 2008.) Fiona Thompson
Azar Nafisi Fourth Estate, £7.99 or £5.99 on Amazon
I went to hear the author at a PEN event at the South Bank in October and she was wonderfully articulate and inspiring. Azar Nafisi was born in Iran and taught English Literature at Tehran University. When Iran became the Islamic Republic, teaching the works of Jane Austen, Henry James and Nabokov became questionable and possibly subversive. Literature - representing other cultures, moral codes, ways of thinking - became a release and rallying point for an increasingly resistant group of young women being forced towards conformity. This is a beautifully observed, philosphical book that allows no easy answers to difficult questions. It makes you think through your own beliefs and prejudices by exploring the relevance of great writing to everyday life. The author now lives in Washington but there's a good chance she will be returning to London to speak at a PEN festival in April. John Simmons Buy from Amazon: Reading Lolita in Tehran
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
Directed by David Silverman 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, £19.99 or £11.98 on Amazon
It may not be the laugh a minute we’ve come to expect from a regular episode of The Simpsons, but that would be exhausting. With a bigger canvas, 'The Simpsons Movie' is more fantastical and ambitious, though all the regular characters we have come to love are still lumbered with their familiar foibles and weaknesses. As an exercise in brand extension and well-paced narrative this is hard to beat. And the skateboard sequence is pure genius. Jim Davies
TOUJOURS TINGO: EXTRAORDINARY WORDS TO CHANGE THE WAY WE SEE THE WORLD
Adam Jacot de Boinod Penguin, £10.99 list, or £6.59 on Amazon
Why change a winning formula? If you enjoyed the earlier ‘Meaning of Tingo’, here’s some more to put in your pipe and smoke. A collection of hand-picked phrases from around the world which are peculiar (in more ways than one) to their language. For example, in Germany a young man with suspiciously good manners is called Tantenverf rhrer – literally, aunt seducer. So whether you are physiggomai (excited by eating garlic in Ancient Greek) or knedlikovy (rather partial to dumplings in Czech) there’s plenty to keep you chuckling after you’ve run out of jokes from your Christmas crackers. Jim Davies
I immediately warmed to Fountains of Wayne when I discovered they were named after a local New Jersey garden centre. Though they’re from over the Pond, their musical sensibility is more English – think XTC, Squeeze, or early Elvis Costello for FOW’s spiky brand of power-pop. But where they score really high is for storytelling – each song a concise, cleverly crafted tale from a different point of view. The high-school kid with a crush on his friend’s Mom; the drunken executive with a ‘bright future in sales’; the waitress waiting for her big break; the lovelorn loser yearning for a his kindergarden sweetheart, now famous. The new CD, 'Traffic And Weather' sounds promising too. Jim Davies
PG Wodehouse Penguin, £12.99 list or £9.99 on Amazon
For an instant Christmas pick-me-up, you can’t beat a blast of ‘Plum’ Wodehouse. Having already gorged myself on the Jeeves and Wooster books, I’m finding the Blandings series provides a diverting alternative – with a broader cast of perfectly observed characters, from fleckless young men to ferocious aunts and bumbling aristocrats. Wodehouse’s has an infectious love of language, his deceptively complex sentences flowing effortlessly like a meandering brook.
See below…
It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
Barmy went to the door and opened it sharply. There came the unmistakable sound of a barmaid falling downstairs.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
Iain Sinclair Penguin, £9.99 list, or £6.99 on Amazon
A quite remarkable book, part poetry, part urban travelogue, that describes the author's wanderings around London and his attempts to uncover and understand its psychogeography. Lyrical and gritty in equal measure. Engrossing stuff for anyone interested in the secret history of the capital. Roger Horberry
Patrick Keiller
I’d like the box set of two Patrick Keiller films please, ‘London’ and ‘Robinson In Space’. Robinson remarks, quoting Wilde: 'It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.' An apt point for a film that lets Britain draw its own conclusions. Particularly worth watching for what it shows about business and design. And two beautifully weighted voiceovers. Clips, stills and background at www.luxonline.org.uk. Tim Rich
They may be ultra-fashionable now, but ultra-short stories have a long pedigree, especially in the USA, where the short story has a lot more cultural traction. Brautigan, a late Beat author was probably the best short short writer. A clear influence on the playful games of Dave Eggars, his tales of pre and post-Depression American, and the relaxed vibe of San Francisco are captured with a poet's eye and startling economy, and twists as breathtaking as a California highway. Rishi Dastidar
After a moment under the mistletoe, you might want to take a trip down to the Barbican.
Sex sells, so they tell us. That would certainly seem to be the case judging by the numbers ogling this revealing show, which is already into its second month. Graphic, but never salacious or titillating, the show considers how sex has been represented in art by different cultures and in different eras. Though mainly visual, ‘Seduced’ touches on the literary (De Sade, Bataille, DH Lawrence) and the aural – how sex can be expressed through sound and dialogue. In the end what comes across – bar the odd deviant – is how similarly artists have treated the hot topic over the world and over the centuries. Though it’s complex and emotive, sex is in many ways an extremely basic subject. Jim Davies
SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG
Kitty Burns Florey Harvest Books, £6.56 on Amazon
A real little curio this. I discovered it in a midtown Barnes and Noble, during a recent trip to New York. It's all about sentence diagramming, what was apparently a common method of teaching grammar to US kids until the 1960's. Using the method, one can break down the relationship between clauses, objects and other elements of grammar that frankly I don't understand, in the hope that this leads to 'better' writing, whatever that happens to be.
Burns Florey is an excellent guide to this lost art, at once nostalgic and enthusiastic, but not blind to the faults of the methodology, as well as its strengths. And some of the sentences that she diagrams - especially those of Henry James - are eye-poppingly complex, and worth the price of entry alone. If you found 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' a tad too strident, this could be for you. Rishi Dastidar
Directed by Jason Ensler Warner Home Video, £208.99 list, or £118.97 on Amazon
What I'd like in my stocking is... the sock-destroying boxset that is the complete 'The West Wing' on DVD. Can there be anyone left who hasn't sung the praises of this show now? As much as I consider Aaron Sorkin a genius of TV drama (yes, even to the point of sticking with the unjustifiably maligned Studio 60), I even love the seasons post-Sorkin, for the usual sharpness, paciness and strong-hearted idealism. As escapist fantasy goes, it's pretty much near damn perfect. Rishi Dastidar
James Surowiecki Abacus, £7.99 lits or £5.99 on Amazon
My fantasy present would be an advance copy of the “Nottingham Forest’s glorious 2010 Premiership winning season” DVD, but in the likely absence of that, I’d be delighted to find a copy of 'The Wisdom of Crowds' (not football crowds of course), which is quickly turning into one of those Tipping Point style books that identify and describe ideas that are out there and being highly influential. Martin Lee
A barky, smoky exploration of the role of woods and wood in our lives. Deakin interviews all sorts of woodfolk, from aboriginal women to sculptor David Nash. This is atmospheric autumnal reading full of insight and warmth, but it comes with spirit and edge. "The enemies of woods are always the enemies of humanity", writes Deakin, who died last year. Tim Rich
Just off junction 38 of the M1 near Barnsley Free admission
I went up to Yorkshire Sculpture Park the other weekend. So here's a present for all members of 26 - write yourself (or request it as a surprise from your loved one) a handwritten note suggesting a day out in the week after Christmas. Go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park - just off junction 38 of the M1 near Barnsley - and spend a few hours wandering around. Beautiful landscape with sculptures placed cunningly in it. And a fantastic exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy that you really shouldn't miss - exhibition finishes 6th January. www.ysp.co.uk <http://www.ysp.co.uk>
Even better, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is free, although you can make a donation. It has a nice cafe too. Whatever the weather (snow might be best) it's a wonderful place to go walking and look at some amazing works of art in a natural landscape. John Simmons
CASSELL'S DICTIONARY OF SUPERSTITIONS
David Pickering Cassell Reference, from £0.75 (used and new) on Amazon
For Hallowe’en, I recommend a candlelit night in with Cassell’s Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering. Glance through it and even the most rational of humanists will have picked out a good few weird habits to add to their normally reasonable behaviour. How about stuffing thin slices of orange peel up your nose to cure a cold? Drinking cold coffee to improve your complexion? Curing whooping cough by letting a ferret drink from your bowl of milk (before you do)? About Hallowe’en is says that “attempts to Christianise the festival by making it the eve of All Hallows Day or All Saints Day, when Christian saints are and martyrs are commemorated, have failed to obliterate its essentially pagan character”. Delighted to find that it’s unlucky to clean a house after the month of May. (But which year?) Sarah McCartney
Deadwood, the HBO series set in a Dakota gold-rush town in the 1870s, is perfect for a Hallowe’en night in. It has a high gore factor, from the blood dripping down the butcher’s window in the opening credits, to the mandatory throat-slitting per episode, and the unfortunate victims that are frequently fed to Mr Wu’s pigs. But Deadwood has a compelling darkness that is due to much more than blood ‘n’ guts. I watch it for Lovejoy brilliantly transformed into Al Swearengen, the foul-mouthed saloon owner, for Wild Bill Hickok, for its great writing and for the vicarious thrill of witnessing a place without any laws or rules. Fiona Thompson
Armand Marie Leroi HarperPerennial, £6.74 on Amazon
A scientific history of human mutation, and how various unfortunate ‘mutants’ over the centuries have helped to advance our understanding of genetics. Written with admirable precision, the cast list includes the likes of James Merrick (the Elephant Man), Eng and Chang (conjoined twins), Uther Hermann (the Armless Fiddler – don’t ask) and Tognina Gonsalvus (the Hairy Child – definitely don’t ask). The heart-warming conclusion is that, to a greater or lesser degree, we’re all mutants in our own special way. Nick Asbury
Imagine Elvis crossed with the freakiest B-movie, and you’ll have some idea of what The Cramps are like. The original US ‘psychobilly’ band are camp, comic and caustic, obsessed with sleaze, sexual fetishism, clever bad jokes, and cheap comic-book cliché. ‘Off The Bone’, a compilation of their raucus early stuff is a good place to start, and it includes one of their finest moments – ‘Human Fly’.
Well I'm a human fly
It's spelt F-L-Y
I say buzz, buzz, buzz, and it's just becuzz...
I'm a human fly and i don't know why
I got ninety-six tears in my ninety-six eyes
I got a garbage brain, it's drivin' me insane
And I don't like your ride, so push that pesticide
And baby I won't care, cuz baby I don't scare
Cuz I'm a reborn maggot using germ warfare.
This is a theatrical performance unlike anything else (unless you happened to see Punchdrunk's brilliant production of "Faust" in Wapping last year). It's set in a Victorian Gothic building, the old Battersea town hall, and the various narratives are based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe. The audience wear white masks and you wander in this disguise through half-illuminated, meticulously detailed stage sets. Around you, slowly at first, but then with increasing frenzy as the evening passes you become part of one of Poe's disturbing stories with the actors performing around you. I found myself locked in a medical room with a mad nurse who made me promise to dance with her at the end. And so at the end the whole audience converges from different parts of the building that we've all been wandering through, in and out of of stories, to take part in the ball....It's all very unsettling, uplifting and memorable. If you can get tickets to be part of it on Halloween night, you'll be very lucky (it's pretty booked up till January) - but if you can't stay in and read a collection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe. John Simmons
THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER
DH Lawrence 'Selected Stories - DH Lawrence', Penguin, £12.99 list or £12.34 on Amazon
This originally appeared in the July 1926 issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, but as you won’t lay your hands on that in a hurry, you can find it in various collections of DH Lawrence’s short stories. It’s a seriously creepy tale of a young boy who can predict horse-race winners by working himself up into a state of frenzy while riding his rocking horse. This was read to me as an impressionable ten year old just before bedtime, and has spooked me out ever since. Jim Davies
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, £15.99 on Amazon
The ‘Treehouse of Horror’ series has become a Simpsons Halloween institution. It’s an annual, gleefully-seized opportunity for brilliant spoofs of writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and movies including ‘2001’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘The Shining’ (or ‘The Shinning’ as Homer calls it). These are the only Simpsons episodes that are allowed stray far, far away from the self-contained universe of Springfield, and into a freer, more fantastical format that allows the writers’ imaginations to run riot. Gloriously gory, curiously creepy, ‘Treehouse of Horror’ is the Simpsons in another dimension. Jim Davies
For some reason the snobby theatre critics have it in for Kevin Spacey's Old Vic. The latest play in the repertoire there is a stage version of Almodovar's film 'All About My Mother'. The critics were luke-warm about it, but I thought it was the best thing I'd seen on stage for a few years. You won't get many more chances to see Diana Rigg perform, and she turns in a wonderful performance - as do the rest of the cast. Get yourself a ticket, whether or not you've seen the original film - this translates well to a different medium and Almodovar was personally involved in the production. John Simmons
This production is first time that Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has allowed one of his films to be transferred to the stage. Playwright Samuel Adamson has kept the all the key Almodóvar themes and expanded upon them, to produce something that, while not as sumptuous as the film, has plenty to intrigue. It is impeccably acted, with Lesley Manville the still heart around which the emotional hurricane blows, and the intensity of the second half is judged to perfection.
But what most struck about the play is that it is not just about religion, family, guilt and homosexuality, but also and nearly as importantly about writers and writing (Adamson quoting Almodóvar quoting Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Lorca, at my rough count) and the importance of writing, and the need that we have to tell stories, to ourselves and about ourselves, to attempt to find ourselves. That the realisation came while watching a transvestite from Barcelona speaking in Welsh accent somehow made it deeper. Rishi Dastidar
ANY HUMAN HEART
William Boyd Penguin, £7.99 list, or £7.99 on Amazon
My best read of the summer was a book I first read a few summers ago and listened to again while driving in the rain around France this August. It's Any Human Heart by William Boyd, the story of a writer called Logan Mountstuart whose life follows the narrative of the century. He becomes a minor player in major events like the Spanish Civil War, and a minor character in the lives of the famous like the Duke of Windsor and Picasso. A wonderful cast of characters, brilliantly told to make you laugh at times, reflect at other times. On the audio book version, read by Timothy West, the story, characters and the whole world came alive again as we drove north and south, east and west across a very grey France. John Simmons
Durs Grünbein Faber & Faber, £12.99 list, or £12.34 on Amazon
This was an unexpected discovery in Borders one Monday afternoon, as I was looking for something to remind me of this summer’s trip to Berlin. It does that, and much more. Grünbein is one of Germany’s foremost poets, and this collection bridges his work from before the Wall fell, and after. He weaves urban folktales, and has an eye for the telling and ridiculous detail, which he brings into wider narratives of life in, and the decline of, East Germany. Michael Hoffman’s translation (and introductory essay) is perfectly weighted too. I’ve dipped into it repeatedly in the past few months, and carried it round with me as a reminder of a great trip. It’s got me writing poetry again too, which I think is the highest recommendation of all. Rishi Dastidar
Derek Jarman Vintage, £6.99 list, or £5.24 on Amazon
This is a glorious celebration of colours. What are they? Why are they? How are they? What do they mean to us? How do we use them? What do we want from them? What qualities do we invest them with? Assigning each chapter a colour, Derek digs deep into painting, literature, philosophy, popular culture, the classics and his extraordinary life, to explore the mind-boggling subjectivity surrounding colours; that once we look beyond the hues they trigger responses, memories, relationships, prejudices, impulses and sensual bomb-shells that go to the very core of us. All the more poignant then that he compiled Chroma as he was dying. His failing eyesight and crumbling bodily functions give it a ghastly urgency; that this man who had celebrated light and colour so profoundly - from his iridescent movies to his Dungeness beach garden - should spend his last months gasping for it. Tom Lynham
J K Rowling Bloomsbury, £17.99 list, or £8.99 on Amazon
My best book of the summer. I’m taking best to mean not the most thought provoking, challenging, fascinating or life enhancing, just the one I looked forward to picking up and which was still in my hands as I fell asleep. Harry Potter. I could pretend otherwise, but the karma police would get me later. Sarah McCartney
Russell Hoban Out of print, but you can get it second hand on Amazon
Witty, eloquent and brilliant. I read 'The Book of Dave' by Will Self recently and someone told me I had to read 'Riddley Walker' to go with it. There are startling similarities - both are set in post apocalyptic England, both are written in their own mutated version of English and both are utterly thought provoking. To be fair Self has written the introduction to the edition I've got so at least he's clear about the debt he owes Hoban. Dystopian fiction at its best. Roger Horberry's best book of the summer. Buy on Amazon: 'Riddley Walker'
THE ACCIDENTAL
Ali Smith Penguin, £7.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
I ploughed through quite a few books this summer, most of them admirable in their way. But ‘The Accidental’ really shone through. It’s the easy virtuosity of the writing, the switching from one point of view to the other, the unexpected turn of phrase and mood, poetic stream-of-consciousness passages juxtaposed with an almost brutal directness. Though the conceit of the mysterious stranger who turns a family’s life upside down is not a new one, Smith brings a freshness to it, managing to keep you intrigued well after you’ve turned the last page. In turns funny, sexy, moving and profound, 'The Accidental' is the most satisfying contemporary novel I’ve read in years. Jim Davies
Davied Nobbs Arrow, £14.99 list, or £10.49 on Amazon
Probably my second-best book of the summer. (Or more accurately three books.) The Complete Pratt is a collection of three volumes chronicling the misadventures of Henry Pratt, winsome but accident-prone northerner. These semi-autobiographical comic novels paint a wry picture of growing up in austere post-war Britain, as the set-upon Pratt battles through the school system, lands a job as a hack on the local paper and moves on to greater things at the Cucumber Marketing Board. It’s well observed and darkly funny, just as you’d expect from the creator of Reggie Perrin. Jim Davies
Robert Musil Picador, £15 list, or £10.50 on Amazon
The best book I read this summer also doubles up as the book I read this summer, partly because the summer was so short, but mostly because the book was so demanding. Somehow, I got it into my head that I needed to read more of The Great Novels, and this is definitively in that camp. Weighing in at 1130 pages, and with more depth of German philosophy than anyone can possibly need for a lifetime, I feel more self-righteous than enriched in truth. So, fellow 26ers, this falls into the category of I’ve-read-this-so-you-don’t-have-to.
So what’s it about? Bright, but drifting and dissolute young(ish) Viennese wastrel brilliantly observes the comings and goings in high society, in the meantime commenting on matters of national, personal and sexual identity, truth and deception, honour and the rest. Truly, a work of genius. Now, where did I put that Ian Rankin? Martin Lee
Mark Cocker Jonathan Cape, £16.99 list or £11.89 on Amazon
A whole book about crows. But somehow you don’t have to be a closet twitcher to enjoy it. It starts with the sight of 40,000 rooks coming home to roost near the author’s new home in deepest Norfolk. From there, he sets out to write a book “about that moment, about the ritual and the elements of the natural world – the light, the environment, the birds, myself – which create it.” The result is poetic and meditative, but also entertaining and eye-opening. You’ll never look at a crow the same way again. Nick Asbury
Chuck Palahniuk Vintage, £7.99 list or £5.99 on Amazon
More murder and mayhem from the man who brought you Fight Club. Brilliant, stripped down, muscular prose with more ideas per square inch than most authors manage over a book (or indeed career). As might be expected, somewhat intense and visceral. If tales of self mutilation, sex changes and prescription drug abuse aren't your thing (although I can't think why they wouldn't be) then steer clear. Roger Horberry
DBC Pierre Faber & Faber, £7.99 list or £3.99 on Amazon
It ain't Vernon God Little, but don't let that stop you. Some of the writing and use of language is just breathtaking, in other places it just doesn't work and seems to try to hard. Interesting to contrast the glowing praise on the cover with the Amazon reviews. That said it still knocks most novels into a cocked hat. Give it fifty pages and see what you think. Roger Horberry
Chris Heath and Pennie Smith Penguin, from £20 on Amazon
In 1991, Pet Shop Boys decided that the USA should fall for their charms, and took their Perfomance tour there for a month long jaunt. Journalist Chris Heath and legendary photographer Pennie Smith were invited to document what was one of the odder rock shows to hit America, with its operatic staging, outrageous costumes and non-resolving narrative. The resulting book is a real treat: a collection of verbal and visual asides which detail the sheer inanity of the US music business and the tensions between commerce and art, and the difficulty of being true to your vision. And unexpectedly it is Chris Lowe rather than Neil Tennant who emerges as the star: by turns, scathing, sarcastic, dry, aloof, petulant, playful – and howlingly funny. If you’re a PSB fan, or indeed a wannabe music industry Machiavelli, it’s well worth tracking this down. Rishi Dastidar
Ann Rand and Paul Rand Chronicle Books, £9.99 list or £9.49 on Amazon
“Some words are gay and bright and full of light like tinsel and silver and sparkle and spin...”
This children’s classic was originally published in 1957, with words by Ann Rand and predictably brilliant design by Paul Rand. It fell out of circulation for a few years but has recently been re-released and it’s well worth getting hold of a copy. If ever you need an example of words and design working together in joyous harmony, this is it. Nick Asbury
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It began in 1984 as a conference for people from those three areas, but has grown to become an annual gathering of "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers". From science and technology to culture, the arts, business and global affairs, the talks at TED are fascinating and inspiring.
The TED website provides a continually updated archive of talks from previous conferences. And it's also a beautifully designed site in its own right. If you're ever feeling like your brain needs a kick-start, take a look through TED. There'll be something there to get the wheels turning again. Mike Reed
UNFORGETTABLE: IMAGES THAT HAVE CHANGED OUR LIVES
Peter Davenport Chronicle Books, £2.90 from Amazon
This is one of those ingenious, deviously simple books that infuriates you because you think “Now why didn’t I have that idea?” It can be easily described. Each page is blank, except for a caption at the bottom that describes what you are “seeing”. Andy Warhol’s soup can, the moon landing, DNA, the Penguin books logo etc etc. The point is, of course, that these iconic images are so perfectly stored in our minds that even the mention of the words evokes the image. A far better book than the same book with all the pictures could ever be. And cheaper to reproduce as well. If you’re thinking, OK, I’ve got the idea, I don’t need to buy the book, well, that’s fair enough, but it’s a fascinating talking point and is a great kick start to creativity. Martin Lee
Blogging was born 10 years ago (my, haven’t you grown). Wall Street Journal analyses what’s happened and asks 12 commentators to commentate. Tom Wolfe is “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’.” http://online.wsj.com. Tim Rich
BREWER'S ROGUES, VILLAINS AND ECCENTRICS
William Donaldson Phoenix, £9.99 list, or £6.49 on Amazon
Incredibly readable roundup of 500 years of the mad, bad and dangerous to know, all brought to you by the man behind the Henry Root letters. The restrained writing only accentuates the sheer weirdness/wildness on display. There's an explosive first novel in almost every entry (if only I could get off my backside and begin). Roger Horberry
Insightful, irritating, eloquent and simplistic soundbites about different areas of business. http://rulesofthumb.pbwiki.com. Tim Rich
DAVID MCCANDLESS
One for anyone who uses Apple products - a very funny way to promote a book about the Internet. www.davidmccandless. Tim Rich
KATE NASH
I've recently stumbled across Kate Nash's music, and she's terrific with words. Original, witty, enchanting. A sort of cross between John Hegley and Mike Skinner. But female. And with her own distinctive sound. So that's as clear as mud.
There's an eponymous album on its way and two singles so far: 'Foundations' and 'Caroline's a Victim'. 'Foundations' is great - a funny, bitter end-of-love song:
Your face is pasty 'cause you've gone and got so wasted - what a surprise.
Don't want to look at your face 'cause it's makin' me sick.
You've gone and got sick on my trainers,
I only got these yesterday.
Oh my gosh, I cannot be bothered with this.
Well, I'll leave you there 'til the mornin',
and I purposely won't turn the heating on,
and dear God, I hope I'm not stuck with this one.
My fingertips are holding on to
the cracks in our foundation,
and I know that I should let go,
but I can't.
Paula Scher Princeton Architectural Press, £17.99 list or £13.49 on Amazon
Really inspiring book by Pentagram partner Paula Scher. Like a lot of good design books, it’s tempting just to flick through and enjoy the pictures. But a proper read pays off. You get a tangible sense of the stories behind the work – particularly the tortuous approval processes and corporate politics with which every designer (and writer) has to contend. And there’s a rare insight into the inner workings of Pentagram, whose financial structure she compares with a houseshare, with “an appropriate mechanism to compensate one roommate for the extra milk consumed by the other”. Full of good sense, good humour and great design. Nick Asbury
Lloyd Jones John Murray, £12.99 list, or £7.78 on Amazon
I love Dickens and Great Expectations, so I was attracted to this new novel. This is a book set in the South Sea islands, drawing on Dickens for inspiration in the most extraordinary way. The story of Great Expectations and its protagonist Pip becomes a way for the novel's young narrator to understand herself and her own life. The story becomes the creative means of survival but also the cause of destruction during an uprising that brings violence and tragedy to family and community. It's a meditation upon the power of storytelling that will inspire and haunt members of 26. Read it with Robert Mighall's chapter in Common Ground as a companion piece, particularly for its moving ending. John Simmons
Not entirely sure about Tyler Brule’s latest publishing venture. On the one hand, the international lifestyle it celebrates is jarringly at odds with the green spirit of the age. (It apparently targets the kind of person who has dinner in Madrid and pops over to Reykjavik for dessert.) On the other hand, it looks undeniably smart and has some interesting writing, like the recent piece on the world’s top 20 most liveable cities. (Munich came top.) Worth a look – just make sure you recycle it when you’re done. Nick Asbury
PENGUINS STOPPED PLAY: ELEVEN VILLAGE CRICKETERS TAKE ON THE WORLD
Harry Thompson John Murray, £12.99 list, or £7.79 on Amazon
Here’s another book about the peculiarities of the English, as refracted through fruitless summers spent chasing a red ball around a field. For those of you who have flailed helplessly as the dobber dribbled past your bat, or who’ve stood by helplessly as your perfect leg-cutter has whistled by your ears, Harry Thompson’s evocations of the exasperations that is the mediocre cricketer’s lot will ring true. For the rest of us, marvel in the sheer lunancy that is organising a cricket tour that visits five continents in three weeks, and the gallery of rogues that troops on and off the field. Did I mention there’s a laugh on nearly every page too? Rishi Dastidar
CLIVE JAMES Picador, £7.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon
Snort. Mmmmfff. Gurgle. Hee hee. These were some of the sounds that I made while trying to read this on the Tube. The first volume of his memoirs, James’ tall tales of growing up in 1950s Sydney, are a joy. From terrorising all and sundry with his high jinks, to being terrified by girls ’n’ stuff, the retelling of the countless scrapes that he got into will leave you amazed that he ever got out of them. Rishi Dastidar
Delightfully snipey Australian site about business language. www.weaselwords.com.au. Tim Rich
AT THE END OF THE DAY, YOU'VE GIVEN 110 PER CENT
A revealing piece on the Telegraph's web site where readers have sent in examples of the words, phrases and language that most annoys them. Note that 80 per cent of it is best-of-breed, end-to-end, mission-critical, world-leading business speak. Jim Davies
DALI'S MUSTACHE
Salvador Dali & Philippe Halsman Flammarion, £10 list, used copies available on Amazon
There are two real, and little known, treats at Tate Modern's current exhibition about the impact of film on Dali. One is his collaboration with Disney, the short and gripping film, 'Destino'. This book is a record of the other: a 'photographic interview' from 1954 conducted by 'Life' photographer Halsman. He asks Dali a series of faux-naïf, deeply philosophical questions, about his life, his art, his beliefs. Dali answers using just his moustache. Which is as mind-boggling as it sounds. It is acres of fun, and left me smiling for hours. Rishi Dastidar
Another fabulous online edition for those with a peculiar love of old information design and schematics. Look at that horse! Tim Rich
KEAN
The Apollo Theatre, London
This is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre in a new version directed by Adrian Noble. It's about the actor Edmund Kean who was famous for playing the great Shakespearean roles in the 18th century. Confusingly (perhaps) this version is set in the 20th century. The main reason for seeing it is the central performance by Anthony Sher as Kean. Given the opportunity to ham it up as Othello, Macbeth, Richard III etc, Sher seizes it with both hands and wildly revolving eyeballs. But this is a tormented character too, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The biggest surprise, though, is that the play and the performance are wonderfully funny. Sartre - funny? I know, it's not what you might expect. That's why you should go and see it. It's on until mid-August. John Simmons
SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
Simon Armitage Faber & Faber, £12.99 list, or £7.79 on Amazon
I was in a rain-soaked traffic jam on the M25 when a deep, mesmerising voice spoke to me from the radio. These were the first words of the first performance of a wonderful new version of Gawain, written by 26er Simon Armitage and read by Ian McKellen. The rhythm and intrigue and visceral turns of phrase keep you hanging on each new line. If you can't find the recording, the print version is published by Faber. Tim Rich
Irene Nemirovsky Vintage Classics, £7.99 list, or £3.99 on Amazon
Strangely compelling novel documenting the fall of France in the spring and summer of 1940. It was supposed to be in five parts; the author only finished the first two before perishing in Auschwitz. Despite everything it's not at all gloomy and in fact comes over as rather life affirming. Not my usual thing but the quality of the writing won me over. Don't let the crap cover put you off. Roger Horberry
Blimey, some of this is a hard going, not least because of the language Will invents for his dystopian world. Not exactly a barrel of laughs (some of his earlier stuff is really very funny) but instead intelligent, unnerving and disturbing. I must say I think A Clockwork Orange does the language thing better. Good stuff but not for the fainthearted. Roger Horberry
‘I, Claud'
