In Lars Iyer’s Spurious (Melville House, January), two intellectuals go on a quest to understand themselves, discover the meaning of life and find out why an unstoppable fungus is taking over one of their houses. A premise which combines Goon Show-esque humour with profound questioning is certainly intriguing; all the more so as it’s a philosophy professor’s fictional debut.

If cerebral fungi aren’t your cup of tea, look at Michael Cunningham’s latest, By Nightfall (Harper, January). When an unexpected guest arrives in his home, Peter, a New York art-dealer, is affected in a way he cannot quite explain. He comes to realise that he is in love with two people at the same time. His wife. And her brother. This taboo-breaking plot, likely, judging by earlier works, to be combined with a captivating innovation of style, and coming from the award-winning author of The Hours, promises to be a mesmerising literary experience.

But if you feel that you’ve already got enough weighty books on your reading list and want a page-turner instead, there’s always Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson, Doubleday, April). After an accident in her twenties, Christine forgets everything of the preceding day whilst she sleeps. Every morning, she has to relearn the past twenty years she has forgotten. This may sound a similar premise to Fifty First Dates, but this chilling story is far from rom-com, especially when the one person Christine trusts may not be telling her the whole truth.

With the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl, the sleepy town of Hanmouth is suddenly put under the microscope of the press in Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers (Harper, March). As the apparently calm community starts to fall apart, the often comic lives of the individuals who live there are laid bare. A realist novel about a community losing its privacy – cross Middlemarch with 1984 – a crime novel, a political novel, tragic yet humorous too: King of the Badgers sounds like an amalgam of different genres, and given Hensher’s previous success, the odds are this will be one worth looking at.

Finally, for those who prefer dipping into books, there’s Anthony Doerr’s collection of short stories, Memory Wall (Harper, January), which, like Before I Go To Sleep, investigates the correspondence of the past with the present. The nature of short stories inevitably facilitates diversity – and Memory Wall looks ready to exploit this to its full potential. Like another new release, Island of Wings, this book will make you travel with it across (four) continents – and through the minds of characters of many backgrounds and ages.

Apparently only three percent of all books published in the English-speaking world are works in translation. Some small presses have made it their mission to change that. Reading another country’s literature not only enlarges our understanding of the wide world, but it sets free cultural resources that were once fenced in by language-barriers. So in the New Year’s self-improving spirit, here’s a list to get you started.

In January, Dalkey Archive is putting out Brazilian Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s The Goodbye Angel (trans. Clifford E. Landers) described as a “cross between a noir and a Greek Tragedy” in an exploration of Brandão’s “great subject” of the city versus its inhabitants.

Europa will publish Luis Sepulveda’s Shadow of What We Were (trans. Howard Curtis) in February. Summoned by an anarchist called “The Shadow”, three ageing revolutionaries meet in Santiago to complete one final mission. In the sudden absence of The Shadow, it is the bumbling Coco Aravena to whom the others turn.

This March, Melville House is publishing Fiasco (trans. Tom Wilkinson) by Hungarian Nobel winner Imre Kertecz. Fiasco has been described as reminiscent of the works of Kafka and Camus and is set during Hungary’s almost seamless transition from Nazi to Communist occupation.

And in April, in Dasa Drndic’s Trieste (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac) published by Quercus, an old woman sits in north-eastern Italy surrounded by fragments which form a collage (“employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices” says the publisher’s website) telling the story of the son fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen during the Second World War.

East European fiction often cannot avoid the yoke of totalitarian regimes, but those who enjoy a melancholy tempered by humor or cheek might try Bohumil Hrabal, whose novel Harlequin’s Millions was just released in English by Archipelago this past December.

Start the year by avoiding London. (Well, go and see Modern British Sculpture at the RA as soon as it opens on January 22nd because it will be just incredibly amazing. But save the rest.) Instead, take the opportunity to see artists right here in Oxford. The O3 gallery opens with Rad Cam! on the 17th: artists’ responses to what is perhaps Oxford’s most iconic structure. The North Wall Arts Centre, meanwhile, presents the work of the Oxford Sculptors Group from the 24th to the 5th only. On February 1st the Oxford Art Movement are exhibiting work on the theme The Sublime and the Grotesque at Christ Church, and the Sarah Wiseman Gallery will show landscape paintings of Rajasthan by Jenny Eadon.

Back in the capital, Tate Britain opens a historical survey of the medium of watercolour on February 16th, which would be a great complement to the Eadon show. Its content ranges from medieval illuminations to work by contemporary artists like Emin and Hodgkin. Fine Artists might also particularly like to see Art School at the V&A, documenting the transformation of art school practice in the 19th century, including Turner and Constable’s early sketches.

Modern Art Oxford does not disappoint with the next two artists in its line up: with the installations, interventions and other art happenings from Roman Ondák and Michael Sailstorfer, it’s going to be an interesting experience walking into the gallery this March. The Ashmolean, meanwhile, has a summer show which completely departs from its last blockbuster. Images and the State explores the style and content of Chinese propagandist imagery in the Cultural Revolution. Definitely an antidote to all those Pre-Raphaelites. A little further afield, another show of pictures meant to play with your mind is the retrospective of Surrealist René Magritte, on at Tate Liverpool from June 24th.

Autumn means time for the next Turbine Hall artist and this year it’s Tacita Dean, who is perhaps most famous for her 16mm films documenting reflections and alterations of light on surfaces. After Ai Weiwei’s 2010 installation of thousands of seeds became look-and-don’t-touch because of health and safety concerns, it will be hugely exciting to see how Dean employs the space on offer.

Finally, the National Gallery rounds off a year of Renaissance shows with Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. The enormous, expensive, impressive shows have been scarcer than usual this year, but don’t worry. This is the most complete display of da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever held, with loans from all over the world, and looks set to be spectacular. Enjoy.

This lesser-known publisher is now my first and favourite supplier for international fiction that diverges interestingly and refreshingly from the mainstream; having achieved global success with their translations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Quercus’ sense for the quirky and cutting-edge has now become their trademark.

The company’s passion for posterity over pulp is definitely evident in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, launched in January under the imprint MacLehose Press. Its setting in the remote reaches of the Himalayas immediately suggests the new perspectives this novel can convey to the reader as, seeking a fresh start, Maya chooses a settlement surrounded by these hulking mountains. Secluded, yet not isolated enough to avoid the collective threats of her past, the encroaching industrial development and the seemingly unaccountable behaviour of her fellow citizens. Provocative and thrilling, this promises to live up to expectations of Roy, who has already proved her prowess with An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Continuing the travel trend, I’m excitedly anticipating reading Karin Altenberg’s début novel Island of Wings, another of Quercus’ rare birds, to be set free in April. Spanning not only an unfamiliar geographical landscape but also a different temporal one, it traces the tribulations of a Victorian missionary and his new wife as they arrive on an island at the margins of civilization. Closer to the eerie atmosphere of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible than to the harmonious island life of the Swiss Family Robinson, this colonial mystery augurs such haunting questions as the true fate of the natives’ vanishing children and the sanity or otherwise of each of the newlyweds. On an island, as in the mountains, no-one can hear you scream.

The sun still rising as we headed up in the chairlift first thing in the morning. (Clare Richards)

Clear blue skies, the perfect skiing weather, never lasted long. (Clare Richards)

The views were spectacular. (Clare Richards)

So people spent some time taking them in. (Clare Richards)

Approaching the challenge of skiing through the vast snow clouds that were rapidly building. (Clare Richards)

Misty skies as a long day drew to a close. (Clare Richards)

(Clare Richards)

Playing with fire at the largest underground club in Europe. (Clare Richards)

Fireworks, music, mulled wine and snow at the Street Party. (Clare Richards)

London managed to offer up a couple of musical gems to save us from the sea of shite that, as usual, marked out the festive period. Pushing against the tide of nauseating Christmas music was Dalston’s Cafe Oto, a venue that has spent the last year putting contemporary jazz, the free improvisation scene and other less popular music very much back in fashion. Oto’s Christmas party centred around the Academy Quintet’s raucous deconstructions of Christmas carols, primarily concerned with descents into aggressive bursts of free improv and winding passages of timbral manipulation, before giving us something vaguely approaching a Christmas song. I don’t think I will ever experience a more harrowing ‘Good King Wenceslas’, complete with dense tone clusters and furious flute solos. The savaging of carols paused only to allow brief appearances by Miss Dora Prawnshoe – claiming to be a legendary music hall star – to sing the odd song about oysters and ladies of the night. This was a comic musical marriage – and one that highlighted the Dalston free jazz scene’s ability to leave the highbrow sensibilities of Evan Parker (and other such stalwarts), and instead produce moments aimed at non-converts that fuse humorous accessibility with a convincing case for the merits of free improv.

The evening was bookended by performances from the London Snorkelling Team, a group of players that laid down a false sense of security with a twee sound world. Their music incorporated outbursts of dissonance with continuous improvising around a set of live overhead projections of hand-drawn cartoons, as well as a solo from Leafcutter John of Polar Bear fame, introducing a period of transcendental ambience to proceedings. You would be hard pressed to find a worthier music venue than Cafe Oto, which has now established itself as a much needed counter to the various wannabe Shoreditch nights that claim to offer experimental musical creations (whilst more often than not merely serving as a place for idiots to stand around wearing correspondent shoes and gargling overpriced wine). Over the next few months Oto will play host to legendary German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and bassist Barry Guy among others. Don’t miss out.

 I headed back to more conventional territory with the Southbank Centre’s New Year’s Eve party presided over by their artists in residence, contemporary folk band Bellowhead, whose album Hedonism was surely one of the big sounds of last year. Having survived the Christmas-related musical bile that spews out of the Southbank almost continuously during this period, Bellowhead’s three sets were a welcome relief. Following a dance set and various cover versions whilst parading around in circus regalia, the band came hurtling into the third post-fireworks set with unmatchable intensity. Whilst their album Hedonism may have declined to take as many risks as their earlier 2006 offering, Burlesque, such considerations can be set aside in live performance. Their ability to fill the Southbank’s Clore Ballroom with a genre-defying festival dynamic was impressive in itself. Jon Boden’s fiddle playing conducted the endless stream of crescendos and perpetual peaks and troughs whilst in ‘Frog’s Legs and Dragon’s Teeth’ ripped through a demented solo, playing with the darkest timbres and flurried layers of sound. Meanwhile ‘New York Girls’ looks set to fast become a party favourite. This willingness to meld a festival sound with the intellectual considerations of Bellowhead’s early beginnings in folk duo Spiers and Boden makes for compelling listening. 2011 will be an interesting year to watch whether Bellowhead’s listenable experimentation can continue to occupy the ground between the relative fringes of popular music, and a more mainstream position.

There seems to be a rule in Hollywood for cult remakes: the budget is negatively proportional to the magic. And as the budget increases, the wit and charm found in the original diminish. This film is no different, and with a budget of ten times as much as the classic, you can guess how this remake turns out.

For those who haven’t seen the original, they provide a brief summary that explains how Kevin Flynn was able to go into a computer and discover ‘the Grid’ and all the computer programs that inhabited it. He then goes missing for 20 years until his son Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund, enters the Grid to find him.

The huge budget that Disney gave the movie did nothing to improve the story, but was used for the stunning special effects, which successfully bring the Grid into the 21st century. It does this with great action scenes that include exciting disk fights and light cycle chases. Along with the visuals there is a great soundtrack full of 80s-style synth, written by Daft Punk – this is one of the best bits of the movie. Sadly, apart from this, the rest of the film feels incredibly average.

The story is not very engaging to start with and we are left with only the action sequences to appreciate. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t enough to distract from the dull and predictable plot. On top of this, with the exception of Olivia Wilde and Michael Sheen, who are both enjoyable to watch, the rest of the cast are unremarkable. Garrett Hedlund is wooden and unemotional whilst Jeff Bridges falls all over the place.

In pandering to the fans of the first film Kevin Flynn doesn’t seem to have changed in the 20 years he is trapped on the Grid. Although his laid back attitude might have worked for a 30-year old man, it doesn’t feel quite right on someone in their 50s who surely must have lived through an awful lot in those long 20 years, so he seems foolish rather than trendy. There was also a huge problem with the computer animated Jeff Bridges. The programme Clu, which Kevin Flynn creates when he enters the Grid is meant to look like the Jeff Bridges from the 1982 original. However the computer animation was lazily done and although Clu vaguely resembles a young Jeff Bridges, he looks like he has had one too many facelifts, as he has no expression lines. All these problems make the film feel like a Miss Universe pageant: it is great to look at, but lacks any real complexity, depth or true heart.

Overall the film isn’t necessarily bad, it just isn’t good either. It feels very shallow and fails to recapture the magic of the original; even those who haven’t seen the first will easily notice this.

Before I start it should be said that this film is better the less you know about it; so I’m not going to give too much away. You will just have to trust me.

The film is a documentary or ‘reality thriller’ which follows Nev Shulman as he creates a relationship with a family he meets online. His friend Henry Joost and his brother Ariel Schulman film the entire thing; Nev develops an email correspondence with an 8-year-old artist called Abby after she paints one of his published photographs. Through emails, phone calls and Facebook Nev soon gets to know the rest of Abby’s family, whom he jokingly dubs ‘The Facebook Family’. Nev even begins to have some sort of romantic involvement with Abby’s teenage sister Megan. Since this all happens online and over the phone, the whole audience can tell it won’t end well no matter how sweet it may at first appear.

There has been a lot of debate about whether this film is actually ‘real’ or just a marketing ploy. At one end of the spectrum, the stars suggest it is authentic while some critics claim it is a complete fake or somewhere in the middle with parts of it being genuine footage while the rest is a dramatisation of real events.

The film is well put together and uses a lot of computer imagery (Google Maps, Facebook and SatNav) to bind the scenes together, which gives everything a more interactive feel. What brings the film down in my opinion, however, is the ‘mind-blowing’ ending which severely lacks a ‘boom’. I was waiting for my mind to explode throughout the entire 87 minutes and then upon realising the big climax had already happened, I felt a bit put out. If this is a genuine documentary, then I suppose this is understandable: perhaps it is admirable that the ending was carefully handled and not made into something more shocking and less heartfelt. However, I still felt disappointed that my mind had not been blown, as promised.