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SPENDING IT

LAST WEEK saw four big Hindi film releases but the creme de la creme is a movie that was made more than 40 years ago "" K Asif's Mughal-e-Azam.

Now, we have our own strong views on whether films should be computer-colorised "" they emphatically shouldn't, a lesson Ted Turner learnt the hard way years ago "" but the one good thing about the much-publicised restoration process is that it has given us all a rare chance to watch this larger-than-life film the way it should be seen: on the big screen.

So much about this movie is definitive: the romantic pairing of Dilip Kumar and Madhubala as Salim-Anarkali, the "Sheesh Mahal" sequence that broke new cinematographic ground in Indian films, Prithviraj Kapoor's extraordinary, scenery-chewing performance as Akbar.

It's all here, it's all on the big, big screen and it's in Dolby sound "" so make this your first viewing choice for the week.

But if you're disinclined to trudge to the nearest movie theatre and would rather snuggle up with a book, there are a host of options. Pick a category.

Alternative history: That grand old master Philip Roth has had a remarkable run in the past decade, churning out masterpieces with almost-monotonous regularity.

Now, all of 71, he continues his late flowering with The Plot Against America: A Novel (Jonathan Cape, Rs 900), which asks the question: What if Nazi sympathiser/Jew baiter Charles Lindbergh had contested for and won the US presidential elections in 1940, and then made peace with Germany?

Roth brilliantly weaves this hypothesis around his own real childhood, with his family as protagonists.

Note: If the price puts you off, don't fret, a cheaper edition should be out in a couple of months.

Fantasy: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury, £8.99) is a very different type of alternative history, a remarkably sombre fantasy novel set in early 19th-century England, where two magicians of contrasting personality help the British government to overcome Napoleon's plundering forces.

Richer and more measured than the Harry Potter series, with a disquietingly realistic approach to magic and spellcasters, this book could herald a new kind of fantasy writing.

Heavy: If you're up to a seriously challenging read, you needn't look further than David Mitchell's staggeringly ambitious Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, Rs 250), which is nothing less than six separate novellas set in different times and places, written in different styles and linked to each other in the strangest ways.

Be warned that the writing is very turgid in places; but this book has so much in it that's good, it's worth wading through if you have the time and energy.

Gay: We're being only slightly facetious. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (Picador, Rs 300) has been proudly described everywhere as the first "gay novel" to win the Booker Prize (both for the author's own sexual orientation and for the story, about a young man's orientation into a gay sub-culture during the Thatcher years).

This insightful, elegantly written novel stole the Booker from under the nose of the favourite, Cloud Atlas. A case of the judges plumping for "minority writing" over esoteria? Read both and decide.