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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann – my first real encounter with a 'novel of ideas'. It was a couple of months after my first piece of fiction had been published and reading it left me unable to write for several months. I simply could not see what I had in the world to 'say'.

Completely concur – the Penguin books have some excellent covers.

Piaf: A Passionate Life by David Bret. So-so.

It's called capitalism.

The Book of Evidence by John Banville 'Extraordinary' is a grossly overused word, but it is not risking accusations of hyperbole to apply it to John Banville's The Book of Evidence. It's difficult to know exactly where to begin with this - the basics are that Freddie Montgomery steals a...

All of which reminds me of the sig a friend has on their email: "Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather, to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting: "****, what a ride!"

Not Sergei Eisenstein (born in what was, at the time – 1898 – the Russian empire)? Which of course raises the point that Battleship Potemkin is always worth seeing. Just ordered both of these – I've seen the latter but never the former.

Drinking and taking drugs doesn't actually mean someone has no talent or isn't an "all round nice" person.

O assure you, Gerbam, that they're somewhat before my time. ;)

Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) Robert Wiene Extraordinary story of a somnambulist who is used to carry out murders in his sleep. Possibly the zenith of German Expressionism in film. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) FW Murnau Superb telling of the Dracula story, with Max...

I'd suggest that that's a bad reading of the book in question. :) That was the nature of society at the time – for that class – and Austen's book is a satire of it. And an awful lot of women don't have much on their minds these days except relationships and celebrity gossip (judging by sales...

Wouldn't it be better to ask your teacher?

Since, as stated above, I'd rather avoid a tie-in cover, I checked on Amazon.co.uk and found the most recent non-film cover. So I've ordered that for under a fiver. It's amazing what threads on a forum can inspire one to do. :)

Atonement by Ian McEwan – after the issue was raised about film tie-in covers. I looked on Amazon and picked up a non-film edition for under a fiver.

I wouldn't say I never would or have, but generally speaking I'd prefer not to. While it's possible that people who buy the book, having seen the film, could be disappointed, surely something that inspires people to try a book has to, generally, be a good thing? How many people have read...

Completely. I aim to try new authors on a regular basis – at the moment, I'm reading John Banville's The Body of Evidence after reading several posts on a forum praising it greatly. So it's a delight to find that I am enjoying it. I don't assume that I will enjoy every book by an author that...

My other half has a fantasy that, when we're/he's rich, he'll get all the books bound to match, in order to create an homogenous looking old-fashioned style library. If such an opportunity ever occurs, he can steer clear of all my books. Who wants such uniformity? When I walk into someone's...

Adventures of Casanova by Giacomo Casanova The Folio Society edition that I read is a mere 301 pages – a small selection of the adventures laid down in Casanova's 12 volumes of memoir, so it's little more than a taster, but a fascinating taster it is. Casanova was a contemporary of the...

Apologies if I didn't make myself clear. It wasn't intended as a derogatory comment on service jobs per se or even on burger-flipping" jobs per se, but on McDonalds. :)

Good old Monty Python routines. Where would we be without them.