What it’s like to read 163 books in 7 months, according to the Booker Prize judges - The Independent

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It was a dementing process,” says the poet Raymond Antrobus of judging this year’s Booker Prize, the winner of which will be announced on 9 November. “I lost my mind quite a few times.” It’s not a total surprise. Insanity is just one of several responses someone might have to the mammoth task of reading 163 books in seven months, a figure that shakes out to roughly 23 books a month, or roughly three quarters of a book a day.

That, though, is what a Booker judge signs up for. It’s the cost of joining a league that counts Iris Murdoch and Salman Rushdie in its number, and the price you pay for helping to decide who will win one of the most prestigious prizes in the world. Author Patricia Lockwood, a former Booker Prize shortlistee herself and a fellow 2026 judge, was hesitant about serving on the panel. “It wasn’t until my husband said he would read all the books along with me that I was for sure a yes – I thought what a wonderful way to ruin his life for a year!” she laughs. More seriously, she adds, it was nice to have a comrade in what “can be a fairly lonely, isolating process”.

Joining Lockwood and Antrobus on the judging panel this year are Pulp rocker Jarvis Cocker, literary critic Rebecca Liu, and classicist Mary Beard. Together they whittled down 163 books to a longlist of 13 before whittling that down further to a shortlist of six titles: M John Harrison’s unsettling sci-fi novel The End of Everything, Marlon James’s Jamaica-set novel The Disappearers, Luke Kennard’s campus comedy Black Bag, Rebecca Perry’s timeline-shuttling debut May We Feed The King, Elizabeth Strout’s 11th novel, The Things We Never Say, and the multigenerational epic John of John by Douglas Stuart.

It has been a long road to get here, and a gruelling one, too. In a time of dwindling attention spans and plummeting reading rates, getting through one book a month may now be admirable. Twenty-three? Unthinkable. Lockwood says that it was “a matter of muscling through at certain points” – and required some trial and error on her part to find the most effective way of achieving her goal of one book a day. “If you did it first thing in the morning, you felt like you were making headway, but it actually turned out to be better to read in the afternoon so it didn’t consume the entire day’s work,” she says.

Antrobus, meanwhile, pulled on his former life as a competitive swimmer. “When you’re training for time trials, it’s very regimented: you know what your best time is and what your best stroke is, but you’re still trying to beat yourself. So it got to a point where I knew what my reading time was and I knew what conditions I needed to improve my reading and so I was able to modulate that,” he says. “I knew that if I had done 50 pages before nine o’clock then I was in a good spot, and if not, it was go, go go!”

Optimal reading conditions for Antrobus meant two things: enough sleep and a liquid diet. “I didn’t eat for the first seven hours of the day, nothing that will suck the blood out of my brain… I ate a lot of soup.”

For both of them, it meant learning to put a book down when they knew it wasn’t right. “It was not going to be physically possible to read them all the way through,” says Lockwood. Antrobus read the first batch of 40 novels back to front – “that’s when I lost my mind” – before giving himself permission to come to a judgement sooner. Lockwood remembers something Wood told her and her fellow judges: “This is a treasure hunt. It’s not a punishment in hell.” It was certainly advice worth bearing in mind when staring down the barrel of 87 books and a ticking clock.

That Antrobus has a toddler certainly didn’t help with the workload. “I was really almost burning out at one point,” he says. As if on cue, his son, who is home sick from school, calls for his dad off-screen. “I had to go back to the Booker directors because there was a point when I was really struggling, but they were great at advising me on the experiences of other judges who had also been parents and how they’d gotten through it, and told me that everything I was saying was completely normal, which is all I needed. I just needed to know that I wasn’t insane.”

Of course, pretty much everything else had to fall to the wayside. Antrobus hit pause on his teaching duties, while Lockwood found herself totally incapable of enjoying her hobbies. “I take a metalsmithing class, but I found that while I was reading the books, I couldn’t design anything! I couldn’t come up with any concepts because my brain was so much in that reading place,” she says, joking, “I would try to make a ring and it would turn out as a book!”

She did, though, continue her own writing, which included a piece for LRB about the early 20th-century American author Willa Cather – who proved a harsh but helpful litmus test for the Booker hopefuls. “Your main takeaway is, ‘Wow, Willa Cather was a very good writer because some people are really not,’” says Lockwood. “It’s interesting to see the contrast of a person who is a dead legend with people who might be on their first book, or toiling in the midlist range for a long time.”

What order the books should be read in posed another question. Mary Beard, the classicist and chair of the judging panel, tackled the titles in alphabetical order. Lockwood’s approach was more instinctual. “I would just pick up the book for a day and hope it wasn’t too depressing,” she says. “You know, there was a lot of dementia, a lot of drowning and so you were really happy sometimes when you got a book that you could read in a few hours straight through that wasn’t necessarily going to put you in a darker or drearier headspace because that became wearying at times.”

As for the deliberations themselves – of which there were nine, some virtual, some in person. Things could get heated. Not for nothing did Philip Larkin, a judge back in 1977, say the meetings made him want to throw himself out of the window. No threats of defenestration were made this time around, but certainly there were “tussles”, as Antrobus calls them.

Think 12 Angry Men, the 1957 legal drama about a hung jury in a murder trial, says Lockwood. “I was literally like the guy in that, I was using a lot of gestures, I was leaping up. I was doing a lot of physical persuasion. And that part was really fun because it’s not something I’ll do for my own work.” This isn’t to say the loudest voice was always the most persuasive. “Not every rousing, passionate ‘Captain, My Captain’ speech resulted in a book ending up on the list,” says Antrobus. “Compromises were made across the board – but we ended up in a place where everyone was like, ‘OK, we can live with this. We’re happy with this list.’”

As reading’s premier proponents right now, do Lockwood and Antrobus have any words of advice for anyone looking to reignite their love of reading? “There is so much chatter about how it’s so difficult and how our attention spans have shortened, but it’s something that comes back within a week or two if you’re really diligent about it,” says Lockwood. “Put your phone in the other room, pick up a book, get a notebook and you’ll find yourself approaching that earlier style of reading that we’re looking back on so nostalgically now, but I think with some truth as well.”

For Antrobus, he simply points to the satisfaction you get as a reward for your efforts. “I could actually feel the tingle of my brain turning on… the neurons shifting away from that mindset of checking Instagram all the time,” he says. “And it was so rewarding. If you can really sit with this story and the language and atmosphere and feeling, you come out and you think, ‘Wow, that was so nourishing.’” It’s a feeling Antrobus and his fellow judges hope readers will get from diving into this year’s winner – the announcement of which is just around the corner, on Monday 9 November.

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