Am I speaking in someone else's voice? Ventriloquist's dummy Lord Charles. Photograph: David Sillitoe
I spent the entirety of my 11th year with my nose stuck in a Maeve Binchy creation, and it would have been quite feasible for one who'd met me during that year to think that I was merely holidaying in England. I certainly thought I was inhabiting the Ireland of my books; I speckled my speech with "craic", exchanged my 'mum' for a 'mam' and when I pronounced the word film, I made sure the 'm' came after a two-second delay. My capacity to adopt the accent of my protagonist didn't end there; it's something I battle with every time I pick up a book and it's not always socially acceptable. No sooner have I established a connection with the character; my voice, tone and vocabulary all undergo a strange type of metamorphosis and I quite simply start sounding like them.

After a weekend dedicated to the digestion of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, I was quite incomprehensible. This was particularly bad as I'd begun reading the book aloud to get the hang of the language before reverting to the voice inside my head, but had enjoyed my Scottish twang so much that I had vocally powered on through until the final page. I daresay my flatmates were less than amused to have a loud, foul-mouthed, drug-addled Scottish lady in the house, but it certainly enhanced my enjoyment of the book.

I'm less of a social intrusion while Jane Austen is on my bedside table; if something angers me I will probably only admit to being mildly "vexed", while heaving my chest and restraining my emotions as best I can. Reading Memoirs Of a Geisha had a slightly different effect; I didn't opt for a Japanese accent, but did develop a remarkable talent for speaking almost entirely in Japanese proverbs. An average pub conversation about difficulties at work would give rise to Arthur Golden gems such as

"Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are",

or

"Fall seven times, stand up eight"

and

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how".

You get the picture.

An overload of Martin Amis can leave me sounding a tad pretentious and decidedly smug; Will Self has me peppering my speech with words that are usually neglected in the English language, declaring that "for all his peccadilloes, his books are prehensile and full of proleptic wisdom".

Of course this skill needn't necessarily be an affliction, I should really start using it as a tool; reading a chapter of Salman Rushdie en route to a dinner party, for example, and refraining from dipping into a Dan Brown before a job interview (at the risk of vocabulary depletion). And possibly steering clear of books aimed at the 0-2-year age bracket.

If anyone else is prone to borrowing voices from the fictional world please let me know what you're reading and how you're sounding ...