COULD YOU READ 100 NOVELS IN 100 DAYS?

The Man Booker prize judges' task of reading a hundred novels in a hundred days sounds an arduous one, but can we learn to do it with ease? And in this age of information overload do we all have to learn to read a little bit quicker?

So how long did it take you to get to the end of this sentence?

A second? Half a second? And if you'd known this was a test, would you have done anything differently? Might you have taken a deep breath beforehand, concentrated hard and fixed your gaze? Would you have read it aloud, or not? Would you have run a finger along the line?
And never mind one line, how long did it take to read the last novel you tackled? Many of us have read a novel in a day. Maybe a Marian Keyes or a Michael Crichton on a long journey. But it's hard for most people to wrap their heads around tackling one tome on a Tuesday and then wading through another whopper on a Wednesday.

TONY BUZAN'S TIPS
Silently read the line
Follow the line with a finger
Don't 'backskip'
Understand peripheral vision
Don't try and focus eye on every word

But that's the task the Booker prize judges face. From a period beginning at about the end of March/beginning of April, the five judges have to batter their way through 110 books in not much more than four months. It works out as a little less than a book a day.
And it isn't just about finding whether it was the butler in the pantry with the candlestick. They must consider, analyse and ruminate on the entrants in order to find their way to the best non-American literature in the English language.

Professor John Sutherland was head of the judges panel in 2005 and is heartily bored by the regularity with which he is asked whether he read all of the 120 entrants that were eventually whittled down to John Banville's The Sea.
Of course he did.
"I kept notes on every novel. The notes are deposited with the unofficial Booker historian.
Peripheral vision is good, but looking at the book probably helps

"It isn't just reading, but giving the novel space in your mind. If you watched five films in the same day, my thought is the fifth film wouldn't get the same treatment. If you read too many they crowd each other out."
But he understands those members of the reading public who are filled with baffled wonder when they think of the kind of busy high-powered career people who often fill the jury.
Those who feel swamped might sympathise with this year's chairman of the Booker judges, Sir Howard Davies. As well as being a long-standing reviewer of books, he's the former deputy governor at the Bank of England, the current director of the London Schools of Economics, a trustee of the Tate, and a member of the Royal Academy of Music's governing body. He also reads novels in French.
"Multiply 110 novels of 270 pages, two minutes a page and see how much time the director of the CBI or the director of the LSE has. If they put their hand up and say they have then you must believe them," Prof Sutherland says.

"[But] there's reading and there's reading. I read the newspaper today but I wouldn't want to be examined on it."

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