Being a bookish-type, undoubtedly of frail disposition and chary of crowds and vulgarity, you might not be aware of the concept of mash-ups.

Generally, in the strange and frightening world of young people, this involves some enterprising soul taking two popular music records and taking bits from one - normally the vocals - and playing them over bits from another, usually the music.

At a loose end, I started trying the same trick with literature. Not with the texts themselves (think of the gargoyles you'd produce! Ian McEwan's dialogue blended with Thomas Hardy's descriptions … ) but with the titles; a kind of literary version of those "what do you get if you cross..?" jokes. Combining Billy Liar and Outliers gave me Billy Outlier, by Keith Waterhouse and Malcolm Gladwell – a book that, one assumes, would posit that northerners with overactive imaginations are the best-placed sector of society to triumph in the world today. Rosemary's Tar Baby, by Ira Levin and Toni Morrison, meanwhile, would presumably see a disparate group of Americans gathering in a Caribbean mansion owned by Satan's daughter.

This isn't my creation, of course. It's one of those internet memes that surface every now and again, most often using film titles but occasionally books. Over on the Miss Cellania website the topic was tackled last summer, picking up a baton that apparently started off from the Washington Post. Of those mentioned on her blog, I like the mash-up of Shakespeare and Seuss best: "Green Eggs and Hamlet - Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery."

The Infomancy blog has also joined in the fun, and showed that with a clever bit of tweaking you can mash-up books without actually mentioning the correct titles, like this: "2001: A Space Iliad - The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane 10-year war against the Greeks after falling victim to the Y2K bug." Great stuff, though a shade too advanced, perhaps, for the amateur book-masher.

My suggestion this Friday, therefore, is that we all have a go. Before handing over, here are a couple more of mine:

Jurassic Lunar Park, by Michael Crichton and Bret Easton Ellis: A hip author addicted to prescribed medication imagines he sees tyrannosaurs in his daughter's bedroom.

At the Brokeback Mountains of Madness, By Annie Proulx and HP Lovecraft: Two cowboys spend some time on an arctic peak and find a gateway to another world.

The Story of I (Robot) by Isaac Asimov and Pauline Réage: The sexual awakening of a young android, who really learns the meaning of the Second Law of Robotics: A robot must obey orders given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Your turn.