Judging the 2011 Man Booker Prize

Gaby Wood, head of Books at The Telegraph, offers a look at the judging process for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Reading 138 novels in seven months seems easy in comparison to whittling down the selection.

The novelist Gail Jones recently spoke about the “gift economy” involved in reading a novel. Beyond the question of whether a work of fiction is good or bad, she said, you get something from it that is yours alone. If that is the ideal reading scenario, then it would seem that by definition the gift is non-transferable. How to communicate it to another judge?