In January, a box of books was delivered to my house, the first of many to arrive, with a steadiness that would at times feel overwhelming. I was about to spend the year as a Booker judge. All my life I have dreamed of having swathes of time filled with nothing but reading.
Yet as I stared at that first tranche of books, my overriding feeling was apprehension. Awarding a prize with the power to transform literary history, as well as the winner’s career, isn’t a task to take lightly. Plus, I’d been warned that each judge would be required to read more than 150 books over seven months; a diet, it seemed to me, with a high chance of leaving me feeling force-fed and unable to stomach reading a novel ever again.
The reading was indeed relentless. From January to July, the pressure to keep up with it colonised my thoughts while the books themselves colonised my house. I read at every chance I got and, yes, I did read every book (the question I’m asked most often); though I’ll confess that in the interests of time I was grateful whenever I came across a short novel, or a terrible one.
I read like I did when I was a teenager, voraciously, and all the time – something I haven’t had the luxury of doing since I gave birth to my first child. But above all, what distinguished this reading experience was the edifying company I kept, in the form of my fellow judges: the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, writer Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan and musician Nitin.
