26 members recommend for January

26 is now an official Amazon affiliate. That means if you order a recommended book or CD by following the links to Amazon, 10% of what you pay will end up in 26’s coffers, helping us to put on more events and recommend more books. A virtuous circle, if you like.

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‘Found’ magazine
I collect odd scraps of letters washed into the gutter, strange lost Post-It notes, peculiar posters for country fayres, notices in public places, and all sorts of other hand-written or badly printed electica. I thought I was odd. Then I discovered (or should that be found) ‘Found’ Magazine. Now I think I’m odd but not alone. www.foundmagazine.com. TR



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‘Consider The Lobster And Other Essays’ by David Foster Wallace (Abacus £10.99 or £7.79 on Amazon)
In which America’s pre-eminent post-modern stylist, genius grant recipient, and user of words such as ‘snootlet’, takes on diverse subjects such as the class structure to be found in the US porn industry, Senator John McCain, and why he might be the saviour of US politics, whether or not lobsters feel pain when they’re boiled alive, what’s wrong with John Updike, what’s right with Kafka and why you really ought be concerned about the words you use, while deploying rhetorical tricks such as page-long footnotes, in-text interpolations and 100-word sentences, and being laugh-out loud funny all at the same time. RD





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‘On the Sea I Spied Him – 21 Pre-metaphysical Poems’ by Andrew Tait (Global Ghostwriters, £4.99)
Newcastle poet Andrew Tait went to great lengths to try and attract a publisher for his first volume of poetry – a stint on top of the Tyne Bridge ended only when the police forcibly airlifted him off. And by extraordinary coincidence, the publisher of this second volume just happens to live at his address. Despite his apparent lack of success, Andrew has a surprising number of celebrity admirers – including Sting, Stephen Fry, Andrew Motion and Ivor Cutler. Sir Tim Rice described him as “clearly highly original, if not barking” and his poetry is touching and funny, and well worth a read. Find out for yourself. Order a copy of ‘On The Sea I Spied Him’ by sending a cheque for £4.99 to Global Ghostwriters, PO Box 1041, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE99 2TY. LH

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‘The Jean Vigo Collection’ (Artificial Eye, £29.99 from Amazon)
This collection features the brilliant ‘Zero de Conduite’, a 40-minute film from 1933 that has anarchic schoolboys and teachers running amok in a boarding school. Very silly, surreal and French in a pre-Jacques Tati kind of way. You also get the classic ‘L’Atalante’, where a honeymoon on a barge lurches from romance to high drama, and ‘A Propos de Nice’, a silent montage that captures the rich and poor of the South of France as they prepare for the carnival. FT



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‘Rip It Up And Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984’ by Simon Reynolds (Faber & Faber, list £16.99, or £11.89 on Amazon)
Wonderfully detailed description of a wonderful period and a much needed boost for a neglected age of musical creativity. Essential reading for music fans of a certain age. RH



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‘The Year Of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion (4th Estate, £12.99 or £9.09 on Amazon)
In December 2003, Joan Didion’s daughter was submitted to intensive care suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later her husband of 39 years died. ‘The Year Of Magical Thinking’ is an account of what followed. In her customary prose – cool, clear-eyed, collected – she details how she felt anything but. To the outside world she remained calm and rational; her interior world was a vortex of memories to be grasped at, in the hope that everything would be OK, that he would be brought back. A meditation on grief and mourning, it is also a finely-wrought portrait of a marriage that worked like clockwork. Until the moment it ended. Its power is such that you don’t even notice the tears rolling down your cheek. RD



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‘Jarhead: A Soldier’s Story of Modern War’ by Anthony Swofford (Scribner, £6.99 list, or £5.59 on Amazon)
This is a personal account of the Gulf War which has been around for a while, but Sam Mendes’s film adaptation has just come out. Swofford passed the final hours before the start of the Gulf War sheltering under a truck reading the ‘Iliad’. After the fighting stopped, he turned to writing to help rebuild his life. In ‘Jarhead’, he describes how language was used to desensitise recruits at boot camp. Marines had to refer to themselves in the third person; everyday vocabulary was replaced with corps slang. Stripped of a personal identity beyond the corps, many young marines found it hard to make sense of their lives or readjust to civilian life. It’s a challenging book, but the writing’s good. MB



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‘Balderdash And Piffle’ (BBC2, Mondays 9pm)
Not so much a recommendation as an observation. It says a lot for the popular interest in words that the BBC is prepared to devote a precious primetime slot to light-hearted etymological investigation. But the tone of ‘Balderdash And Piffle’ is over-jolly, its format too like a corny make-over programme, as presenter Victoria Coren zips up and down the country in her yellow Mini searching for linguistic evidence to present to the editors of the OED. The words and phrases under scrutiny say it all really – ‘bonk’, ‘something for the weekend’, ‘phoar’, ‘minger’. And one of the guest presenters is the gaudy-shirted friend to the tax man Adam Hart-Davis, which is quite enough to put anyone off. JD

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‘Labyrinths’ by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99 list or £7.19 on Amazon)
The classic collection of short fictions, including ‘The Library Of Babel’,from a master of intrigue and philosophical mischief. Feel your imagination whirl as he takes you down strange paths of thinking, then leads you to question everything you’ve just thought. A very entertaining way to try to make sense of writing, reading and the universe. TR



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‘Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show!’ BBC Radio Four
Spoof reminiscences of a former variety star, says the Beeb’s blurb, but don’t let that put you off. This is great new comedy in the spirit of the Goons, with a twist of Izzard. More details and repeated shows at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/countarthurstrong. TR

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‘Grooming, Gossip And The Evolution Of Language’ by Robin Dunbar (Faber & Faber, £7.99 list, or £6.39 on Amazon)
An incredibly readable account of just why we humans bothered to evolve language. Basic thesis: it’s to enable us to gossip (in the broadest sense), an activity that takes the place of the nit-picking grooming our ape cousins use to reinforce group bonds. We don’t groom, we chat, and that’s what keeps society going. Along the way it touches on psychology, linguistics, anthropology and all sorts of other -ologies and -istics. It ain’t heavy, it’s dead interesting. RH



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‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ by Jonathan Safran Foer (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 list or £10.49 on Amazon)
This is Foer’s second novel, following ‘Everything is Illuminated’, which has already been adapted into a movie starring everyone’s favourite Hobbit, Elijah Wood. It’s the story of Oskar Schell, an eccentric nine-year-old (inventor, amateur entymologist, computer consultant, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, amateur astronomer, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, origamist, detective and collector of butterflies) whose father has been killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The book follows Oskar as he tries to make sense of father’s death, a mysterious key, and all manner of questions arcane and philosophical. As well as the breathtaking writing, Foer has interwoven intriguing ‘found’ images into the text, which won him the prestigious 2005 V&A illustration award. JD



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‘A Novel In A Year’ in the Arts & Books section of the Saturday Telegraph
Hilarious. Cashing in on a thousand New Year’s resolutions, ‘acclaimed novelist’ Louise Doughty doles out by-numbers advice for wannabe Louise Doughtys (or should that be Doughties?). She’s full of pearls like “To not-read when you are writing is as odd as refusing to listen to any French when you are trying to write it”, or “If Dostoevsky were writing today, then he wouldn’t be Dostoevsky”. If she keeps this up for an entire year, I really will be impressed. JD

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‘The Order Of Things’ by Barbara Ann Kipfer (Random House USA, £10.88 list or £9.97 on Amazon)
Ever wondered in what order the 64 Emperors of Byzantium ruled? Or the ranks in the British army? Or how a television dish works? Or the different layers of soil? Or the names of different coal sizes? Of course you have. This uber-reference book tells all. Endlessly interesting in a ‘Scott’s Miscillany’ type way. RH



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This month’s plugs by Jim Davies, Rishi Dastidar, Roger Horberry, Tim Rich, Matthew Blackbourn, Lu Hersey and Fiona Thompson. These are not necessarily the views of 26, but we hope they’re not far off the mark. Any contributions gratefully received.

posted by jim @ 3:02 PM