26 members recommend for March

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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‘A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian’ by Marina Lewycka (Penguin, list price £7.99 or £3.99 on Amazon)
An unlikely sounding title for a funny novel. It’s about Ukrainians but not much about tractors. It’s set in Peterborough... I’m going to stop there, this doesn’t sound too enticing. Against all the odds it works brilliantly – just read it. JS



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Lord Malquist And Mr Moon by Tom Stoppard (Faber and Faber, £7.99 list or £6.39 on Amazon)
Stoppard’s only novel (really? how did that happen?), ‘Lord Malquist And Mr Moon’ is peopled (as you might knowingly expect of something written the year before ‘Rosencrantz’) by the slightly deranged, on the fringes of where the real action is going on. So, in a timeless yet out of time London, meet a dandyish fop interested only in Style (is it Wilde? Johnson?), two upper-crust cowboys, an Irish Jesus, a lion and a diarist/historian (is it Bosie? Boswell?) suffering from an existential crisis, writer’s block and an uninterested wife. He has aphorisms to record, a state funeral to get to – oh, and there’s a bomb ticking in his pocket... RD



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‘The Sun’ magazine
The American magazine, ‘The Sun’, is the polar opposite of the British tabloid of the same name. It’s a non-profit, ad-free monthly that gives a voice to oddballs, peace protesters, philosophers and former tramps. Stand out essays include Gregg Krech writing about the ‘Revolutionary Practice of Gratitude’ (December 2004) and Jeffrey Sawyer describing how he left his job, home, family and friends to walk across America (June 2004) without any money. There’s also poetry and enigmatic black-and-white photos. Good if you want unusual pictures, stories and ideas to stir your imagination. www.thesunmagazine.org. FT

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Light my fire
Dan Flavin, US light artiste extraordinaire, has a rather fine show on at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. Good for kids. See www.hayward.org.uk/flavin/retrospective.htm. And if you happen to be passing Wakefield, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as another superb light exhibition on, this time by James Turrell. The whole of YSP is great for kids. RH

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‘Word A Day’ newsletter
It’s hard to imagine a 26 member whose average day wouldn’t be improved by a subscription to the ‘Word A Day’ newsletter. Each day, normally in the morning, you are emailed with a word, its definition and etymology. Generally, there is a weekly theme and at the end of the week there is another email that rounds up subscribers’ emailed reactions to the words of the week. The choice of words is always stimulating and the themes are often witty.

It’s a joyful site, and in addition to cherishing words, they know how to use them. Here is their introduction to last week's theme: “This week we feature a potpourri of words. We opened a dictionary, shook it gently, and these words fell out. They came in all shapes, sizes, and senses. They're short and long. They’re flighty and grouchy. Call ’em what you will, a medley of words, a farrago, or a gallimaufry. They’re disparate, they’re diverse. They are varied and variegated, unclassified and unsorted. And they’re all ready to serve.”

Need further persuasion? It's free. Hurry now to www.wordsmith.org and
don’t look a gift word in the mouth. ML

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‘The Whole Equation’ by David Thomson (Abacus, £9.99 list or £6.59 on Amazon)
Opening the paperback edition of David Thomson’s ‘The Whole Equation’, you wonder if it’s not a little close to self-congratulatory overkill that there are three pages of quotes and praise for the hardback edition. It turns out three pages is nowhere near enough.

Thomson’s history of Hollywood is a triumph. Aphorisms and insights abound on every page, and nearly every paragraph. His idiosyncratic, conversational style disarms you like a warm bath, but then a snarl of a robust critical judgement suggests there's some mercury in the water with you. His thoughts on the business, the geographical and social advantages of being way out west – the hard light, and the soft law, primarily – the studios, the (re)making of stars, the fiction of the numbers and the way they can be manipulated to tell any story the studio might care, are never less than provocative.

But the book’s greater achievement is to restore the role of writers: from first to last, everything turns on words and stories, both on screen and in the myths that surround it. And how can you not love someone who says this: “Broke writers need their confidence restored before they can write. They need a couple of Martinis and a steak dinner.” RD



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‘Wallace and Gromit: The Curse Of The Were Rabbit’ (2 DVD set £22.99 list, or £13.79 on Amazon)
Just out on DVD, and now with a gleaming Oscar to boot. Nick Park keeps the pace at full throttle and the gags flowing freely in his first full-length animated feature. As usual, it’s the details that make this film special, so keep your finger on the pause button. I particularly liked the retro fridge with the SMUG logo and the bookshelf crammed with cheesy literature – ‘The Hunt For Red Leicester’, ‘Brighton Roquefort’, ‘How Green Was My Cheese’, ‘Brie Encounter’, ‘Swiss Cheese Family Robinson’, ‘East of Edam’, ‘Grated Expectations’, ‘Fromage To Eternity’, and my personal favourite, ‘Waiting For Gouda’. JD



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‘Unspeak’ by Steven Poole (Little, Brown, £9.99 list, or £5.99 on Amazon)
If you think politicians speak a mixture of fatuous nonsense and double-speak, this is the book for you. It’s a compelling diatribe against the way these jokers bend, brutalise and bastardise the language to their own devious ends. In many ways ‘Unspeak’ is an extension and update of Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Politics And The English Language, in which he wrote “Political Language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. JD




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‘Capote’ (United Artists and Sony Pictures Classics, directed by Bennett Miller)
The story behind the writing of ‘In Cold Blood’, Truman Capote’s final novel, whose starting point was the brutal, real-life killings of the Clutter family on a rural farm in Kansas. Capote befriended the convicted killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickick on Death Row, and was even rumoured to have had an affair with Smith. The film is a poignant exploration of the role of the writer, given credence by an Oscar-winning performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. It raises pertinent questions about the line between detachment and subjectivity, fiction and non-fiction, and the morality of the artist. Brave subject matter for Hollywood, and deftly handled too. www.sonyclassics.com/capote. JD



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This month’s plugs by Jim Davies, Rishi Dastidar, Roger Horberry, John Simmons, Martin Lee 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 @ 12:10 PM