My answer to "What's your favourite book?"

The "favourite book" question is an impossible one, of course. But this is the one I always end up giving as my answer. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, by Michael Ondaatje. It's a perfect little book, knitting a life of William "Billy the Kid" Bonney from history, mythology and Ondaatje's own imagining.

Now best known for The English Patient (also easily in my top five, and a vastly better book than a movie), Ondaatje is a staggering writer. Like the very best, he makes English sound new again. But he tends to do it with very simple words. It's poetic, but not flowery; lyrical without being pretentious. It's their placing - in relation to each other and sometimes even visually on the page - that makes Ondaatje's familiar words startlingly fresh and deeply resonant.

Ondaatje is equally renowned as a novelist and as a poet, and in this book the two disciplines dissolve into each other, forming something quite unique. A collection of poems weaving a story, or a novel written in poetic language? Who cares? This is how writing should be: grounded in character and story, economical, precise, fluent; at once earthy and unearthly...

No, it's no good: I can't do it justice. Read it. It's very short, but most writers fail to achieve this sort of beauty, scope, humanity and ferocity in books twice or three times the size.

An extraordinarily funny book

Of course you know this, but the late Grahame Chapman was one of the Monty Python team, and is widely regarded as its most eccentric of all. This is his autobiography, more or less, and it's still one of the funniest books I've ever read. It's as anarchic as he clearly was himself, it's often startlingly angry, and just as often (as just as startlingly) extremely touching.

As well as being phenomenally funny and a gifted actor (just remember "Brian"), Chapman was gay and an alcoholic. Both of which led inevitably to various forms of friction. (Some of them quite fun.) He doesn't hold back on any of it, and you get the feeling he wasn't the easiest man to live with. But you also get the overwhelming sense of an incredibly intelligent, caring, hysterically funny, and really very sensible human being. A book that brings on tears for all sorts of reasons.

The English Patient. Put the DVD down, and buy the book

"She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house."

Now maybe it's just me, but reading that opening paragraph meant one thing: I was reading the whole book. It's not exactly "There was a terrific explosion and Hurst was thrown to the floor of the aircraft as it fell into a screaming descent", but it's got everything I want. It's the sketch for a picture I want to see more of. It's straight into storytelling, without preamble. It's an introduction to a writer who sees wind as "a buckle of noise in the air", and drops that hard, metallic word in amongst languid, gentle language to emphasise the point. And that first sentence: simple, rhythmic, lucid.

Gives me shivers.

If it does anything for you, read this epic, stunning book. And if at all possible, don't watch the movie first. The visuals in the book are just as good, and there's a lot more story besides.

The Name of this Band is Talking Heads - on CD at last

Rejoice. For at last we have a CD reissue of Talking Heads' epic live album. Plus, it comes with enough extra tracks to fill a whole other CD. And it is, of course, trancendentally wondrous.

The only downside is that fans like me who never got to see the Heads know from this album (even more than the better-known Stop Making Sense) just how much we missed.

Many years ago, in a pub called The Legless Ladder in Battersea, I met a Dutch girl who confessed to running away from school in the Netherlands to get to a Talking Heads gig. And who can blame her? (I'll never forget her - she was clearly a woman of great musical taste. And she had a live, bright green lizard on her shoulder. Looking back, one wonders why I didn't propose on the spot.)

If you've been waiting as long as I have for this CD, or if you've never experienced musical heaven before, click the picture to buy it from Amazon. (It's even a bargain - under seven quid for a historic two-disc album. Can you argue with that?)