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With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.

You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life.

I think a lot of readers are looking for a book they can talk about.

Yes, we're trying some new stuff. Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems.

I was mad at Screen Gems, but I'm not mad at them anymore.

I was still an avid reader of Mills & Boon romances - on publication day, I used to rush out of work to get to the local book store to grab my favourites before they all disappeared.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.