Judges, stacking time

Judges of the Man Book Prize measure progress vertically:

This weekend I reached an important milestone as a judge for the 2016 Man Booker prize. At 2ft 8in, the height of my book stack has matched that of my eighteen-month-old daughter. My book pile will grow far quicker than she will – last year the judges read one hundred and fifty six books; I’ve just closed number twenty nine – but it felt like a significant moment.

When I was asked late last year whether I’d consider judging the most prestigious literary prize in the English-speaking world, it was the reading I first thought of. When Philip Hensher reflected on judging the prize, in 2001, he recalled that the reading load (which works out as something like a novel a day) had been no problem: he had read five novels a week since he was five years old. But I worried about fitting it around teaching; around writing; around parenthood. I spoke to past judges, who recalled snatching reading time wherever they could: actors had special book-pockets sewn into their costumes; other judges recalled snatching a few pages between courses at dinner parties. I asked my long-suffering partner if she’d suffer even longer. I asked my head of department if he’d mind me shirking my marking duties. In the end I decided it was too irresistible an opportunity to say no to. And so I had some new shelves built in my office and settled in to the most comfortable chair in the house. 
The judges select the ‘Man Booker dozen’ in March, followed by a shortlist of six in April, with the winner announced in May 

Man Booker reading is measured not in page numbers or amount of books, but in feet and inches; in pounds and ounces. Books as matter. Every few weeks a new box of books will turn up, borne by some beleaguered courier, to be added to the pile. The key to getting through it, I’ve found, is not to try to fit the reading around other things but to find, or create, uninterrupted tranches of time in which you are free to do nothing else. The flexibility of academia is an advantage here: if you get going by 6 or 7am you can get through your daily quota by lunchtime, leaving the afternoon free for teaching or writing. Every now and then you get a nine hundred page monster which sucks up a couple of days, but these are usually offset by a run of shorter books (I wonder if Julian Barnes’ win in 2011 for the slender The Sense of an Ending has encouraged publishers to take greater risks over what they consider a novel-length book to be?).