Will it be The Invisible Man or Bell Jar, The Dark Is Rising or For Whom the Bell Tolls? Scottish Book Trust is celebrating Book Week Scotland with an online poll, of course. But this year’s vote isn’t looking for readers’ favourite books, instead it is trying to find our favourite songs with a literary connection.

Some of the songs on their 40-strong list of possible choices wear their bookish credentials on their sleeves. There are songs where no attempt has been made at obliqueness or subtlety, with titles lifted directly from the works that inspired them. Step forward Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) and the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). For others, the connection is almost as direct. Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel was the lead song from the movie adaptation of Richard Adams’s Watership Down, while Leonard Nimoy’s The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins does exactly what it says on the pipeweed tin. And Radiohead’s Paranoid Android takes its title from Douglas Adams’s depressive robot in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But the list threw up a couple of surprises for me. I feel a bit silly that I never realised Katy Perry’s teen anthem Firework was – according to the singer – inspired by one of my favourite novels: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Then again, one of the most oft-quoted passages in the Beat classic is Jack’s paean to the mad people who never say a commonplace thing but “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”.

Similarly, T’Pau’s China in Your Hand – which spent what felt like a million years in the charts in 1987 – was apparently based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I never knew. I think the fact that T’Pau took their name from a Vulcan in the original Star Trek series was enough of a geek fact for me not to require any more.

And I once performed a version of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand at a covers night in Preston, but its demonic, shadowy tone always reeked of southern gothic to me, not Milton’s Paradise Lost, from which the song’s title is drawn. Maybe some songs are so strong, or – like Perry’s firework – so ubiquitous that they leave the sources of their inspiration behind?

There’s no sign of The Cure’s Killing An Arab, based on Albert Camus’ L’Étranger, nor Nirvana’s Scentless Apprentice – infused with Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. And there’s no Smiths, despite Morrissey’s quip that “There’s more to life than books, you know. But not much more.” With a world of rock and pop to choose from there are bound to be some missing pieces. But what are your favourite literary songs? And are there any songs that have changed the way you read the books that made them?