We don't have to think about what we like, but thinking can be part of our pleasure, rather than opposed to it. When I was asked to write Film: A Very Short Introduction – the book became the 300th in a series that covers topics from advertising to witchcraft, anaesthesia to the World Trade Organisation – I jumped at the possibility, because I took it as a chance to think fast and hard about a much-loved topic. Not everybody thought this was a good idea. One of the publisher's readers said the project was distinctly amateurish, and the other said it was impossible. These responses were not unkindly meant, and I found them helpful. I realised I wanted the book to be the work of an amateur – a lover of film – though not amateurish in the sense of inept. And the genuine impossibility of the thing as a comprehensive enterprise made me think hard about what might be possible in smaller dimensions.

The book is an essay, not a history or a guidebook. It attempts to say something about what film has been and might be, when it was born and how it might die; to tell some stories about varieties of film in different parts of the world; and above all to convey a sense of wonder about what makes the films we care about exciting or surprising.

Pursuing this line of thought I got a bit carried away by the paradoxes of film: an illusion of movement that isn't an illusion but a picture of the real moving thing as it moves; a series of still images that, projected at the right speed, produce this illusion that isn't an illusion. I know some people can't bear this low-grade philosophical talk about the languages and technology of vision, but I am still captivated by it.

I also found a way of thinking about film and photography together, as twins and opposites. Roland Barthes once said he had decided to prefer photography to cinema, and he was in good company, with Philippe Sollers, Brassaï and Proust, among others. The argument, broadly, is that photography resists time by stopping it, even at the cost of producing only reminders of death; film, on the other hand, gives in to time, can't offer us anything other than what rolls past us in what Sollers calls "cinematic profusion" and Proust calls a "cinematic procession". This contrast seems hopelessly biased, especially to those of us who prefer cinema to photography, but it may all be a matter of our attitude to time. If we think it is to be lived with rather than fought against, almost everything turns round. And the fact that film is an awakening of still frames into undeniable movement suggests that if photography is about death, moving pictures are about rebirth or resurrection.

I regard my book as a very small contribution to a genre we might think of as the writing up of the surprises of film, and I'd like to suggest 10 books, very different from each other, that do this in a way I couldn't dream of doing. Two are by film directors, two are by film critics, one is by a film scholar, one is by a dance critic, one is by a philosopher, one is a novel, another is (though not a novel) by a novelist, and one is a memoir. All of them pursue the pleasure of thinking about pleasure. The order is chronological.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood (1945)
This delicate, informed and ironic novel recounts the making of a frothy musical (set in Vienna) in the London studios of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. The unreality of the film set, "a half-world", Isherwood calls it, "a limbo of mirror-images", chimes eerily with the grim reality of European politics in the 30s.

What Is Cinema? by André Bazin (1962; translated by Hugh Gray 1967-1971 and by Timothy Barnard, 2009)
Bazin's question is not rhetorical, and his book is full of inventive and still influential answers. Never a purist about the medium, Bazin is always attentive to what the art can be; he's especially interested in long takes and deep focus, which allow the viewer to make choices about what he or she wants to see.

I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (1965)
Surely the greatest of all regular film critics,Kael loved the movies with unflagging passion, and wrote especially well about the films that let her passion down. She was always funny. This is the first collection of her work, but there are many others, all wonderful.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell (1971)
Cavell is a philosopher who finds in a film a reflection of ongoing questions of scepticism about reality. Film is mesmerising because, among other reasons, it presents a world perfectly complete without us, converting us into ghosts as we watch it.

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce (1972)
It's very hard to write about movement, and Croce manages the almost unheard-of feat of being faithful to the lightness of art, catching so much of what is remarkable about Astaire and Rogers's work.

Hollywood by Garson Kanin (1974)
Perhaps the funniest, most intelligent book about Hollywood. It contains the story of Sam Goldwyn overcoming his advisers' doubts about The Thomas Crown Affair. No one understood the complex plot, but Goldwyn was serene. "Stop worrying," he said. "The public is f'Chrissake smarter than we are!"

Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson (1975; translated by Jonathan Griffin 1977)
Uncanny epigrams from a master director. You don't have to believe what they say to enjoy their style and reach; there are austere jewels on every page.

My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel (1982; translated by Abigail Israel 1983)
An autobiography written with Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. There is mischief everywhere from this staid man with a wild mind, who understood the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie from the inside.

The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992)
This is among Rushdie's best works of non-fiction. Full of great thoughts about colour and Kansas and fantasy, and how there really is no place like home, because no place is home.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey (2005)
A scholar well-known for her work on the gender of the gaze in cinema turns her attention to the old and new fact of stillness in the movies, "a projected film's best kept secret". A book that helps us to think and keeps us thinking.