That strange things are done in the name of books is no news to American Mrs Maureen Kelly Quill, who has spent around $20,000 pursuing an obsession with Angela's Ashes.

"Absolutely, this is the craziest thing I've done in my life - and I'd do it again," said Mrs Quill (59), from Lancaster, Massachusetts. Mrs Quill has been staying in the Shelbourne Hotel since late October while waiting to get work as an extra in the Alan Parker-directed movie of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer-prize winning story about poverty in Limerick.

As long as the film editors don't chop the few scenes in which she is set to appear - a possibility that impelled her to postpone a flight home this week - Mrs Quill's odyssey will not have been in vain.

As Angela's Ashes - the novel and the movie - goes down in history, Mrs Quill will, in her own small way, travel with them.

She is not the only reader who has refused to allow caution or convention to get in the way of a good book-engendered fantasy.

Many have journeyed farther and harder in attempts to get inside someone else's book. Scratch a travel writer and you'll find a one-time reader with imagination overload.

The discovery of an obscure sixth century text by religious wanderer John Nochos propelled William Dalrymple into a long quest in search of early Christianity, recorded in his book From the Holy Mountain.

British writer Gavin Young attributes his peripatetic life to an early reading of Joseph Conrad's stories of an adventure-laden East.

Unlike Mrs Quill, who has no intention of moving to a grim Limerick lane, (if such can now be found), Conrad fans can still be discovered eking out often regrettably unromantic livings in remote Asian hamlets and Bangkok slums. From Provence to Colombia and Shanghai one finds wandering souls whose journey began in an armchair with a book.

Others have blamed books for inexcusable or inexplicable actions. John Lennon's killer, Mark Chapman, was arrested with a copy of J.D. Salinger's novel of disaffection, Catcher in the Rye, in his pocket.

The book most often cited as an influence by murderers, including serial killer Ted Bundy, is the Bible, says Brandon publisher Mr Steve MacDonogh, a fan of the King James edition himself.

Mr MacDonogh personally knew two teenage boys whose readings of Jean Paul Sartre's ee Nausea contributed, he believes, to their decisions to commit suicide.

NOT that writers can take responsibility for reader's reactions, though it's a controversial point. "Readers are the second makers of books," says Mr MacDonogh. Because we must use our own imaginations to "see" a written story, books often inspire more powerful effects than movies or TV, contrary to popular belief.

W.B. Yeats famously worried the point when he wrote, after the bloody events of 1916 and while concerned about Maud Gonne: "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot . . . Did words of mine put too great a strain on that woman's brain?"

Unhampered by such cares, Barbara Cartland reportedly boasts that her books have changed lives, or at least, perhaps, improved the market for pink dresses and highblown hairdos.

Countless books really have changed lives. "I was transformed at 17, on reading Ulysses, from a boxing and sports philistine," said publisher Antony Farrell, whose bookish career path was set after he found James Joyce.

As a young man Mr MacDonogh intended to go East but flew to the US instead to meet beat poets like Allen Ginsberg after an encounter with the old spiritual text The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In crisis-hit Thailand today, pop stars have rushed to buy mountain-tops as gloomy books interpreting French seer Nostradamus forecast an imminent global deluge.

The relationship between writers and readers may best be consigned to the file headed "another of life's mysteries".

Mrs Quill's powerful personal take on Angela's Ashes is clearly not quite the same as anyone else's, including inevitably the one conceived in the mind of Frank McCourt.

Still, Mrs Quill's adventure might even be seen as tame, given that through history, other readers have started wars and committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of books.

"It's heartwarming, I think," she said of her trip.

A point with which the Dublin taxi drivers she has been tipping generously for five weeks no doubt couldn't agree more.