The joys of judging the Man Booker prize

Controversy, sexism and a lot of reading judge Sarah Churchwell works out what to do now the party is over

The books are read, the winner is chosen, the speeches are made, the party is over. I knew I would feel a little sad, and I do. The Man Booker prize has already had more than its share of controversy this year: first over changing the rules to allow any author writing in English to enter, a phrase that has been widely interpreted to mean "Americans". As an American myself, I don't find the prospect of Americans joining things especially horrifying. I have always thought nationality a strange eligibility requirement for literary prizes: readers don't care what passport an author holds. That's literature's entire point: it lets us traverse boundaries.

All six judges read 156 books submitted by 94 publishing imprints, and argued about them. That sentence makes this part sound rather breezy. For just over six months, I read a novel a day. Upon hearing this, many people remark wistfully that they wish they could spend their life reading novels. Anyone who longs for such a life has never tried it no matter how much you love books, and I yield to no one in that respect, reading all day every day is work, demanding not only mentally, but physically: for upwards of 12 hours a day, you are forced to remain stationary, which is really not very pleasant. (No, we don't get audiobooks, and I wouldn't want them if we did, because other people's voices are interpretive: it would skew my evaluation.) You also have to read books you don't like, because it isn't fair to throw them away; I came to think of this as the Middlemarch rule. I find the first 100 pages of Middlemarch really heavy going, and if I judged it on that basis only, I'd toss it aside. The rest of it, however, is one of the greatest novels in our tradition. So I kept reading, even the books I didn't like.

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