Chairing the Man Booker judges this year is both an honour and a burden. It is a very prestigious prize that arouses great interest and even passion. The winner - and other books that appear on the long or short lists - can benefit hugely from additional sales. So it is marvellous to be associated with something that has such a good reputation, but the work is serious and has to be done thoroughly and conscientiously. 

We expect to have to read approximately 115 books, and to make matters worse most of them pour off the presses over quite a short period of months, so that at the height of the process we have to reckon on reading a book a day on average.  The trouble with a novel is that if you do not finish it you may miss the twist or the ending that makes it remarkable and memorable. On the other hand, if you cannot bear the first hundred pages you are unlikely to feel that it is the outstanding novel of the year. Every judge is intent on reading every book thoroughly. 

I would not say that I am a particularly good reader - neither especially well read, nor fast at reading. So I had to think carefully about taking this duty on. I could do so this year only by arranging well in advance to leave most of my days (but not evenings) free to read. My particular job is to ensure that the judges work to agreed guidelines and that we reach our decisions in a timely way. Our various meetings to decide the long list, short list and winner are all governed by strict deadlines. We need decisions, and the judges must feel that we reached them in a coherent manner.

I am delighted with the choice of my fellow judges. Together they bring expertise and breadth of outlook. We have met a couple of times already and the atmosphere is good, though it is perfectly clear that we have very different outlooks on life. Will we have such difference perceptions of books?

It is extraordinary how differently people react to novels. At the Costa Awards I was discussing a previous Booker winner Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" with Mariella Frostrup. I loved it and she did not. How is that possible?

Even if the judges do agree broadly on which books are excellent, how do you decide which is the outstanding novel of the year? How would you compare a massive work like Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with a short book like Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach"?  That may well be the sort of choice that we have to make.

We are fortunate this year that a trickle of books has already been steered our way.  They are titles that we know we will have to consider because they are written by authors who have been short-listed or who have won the prize before.  We are bound by our rules to include them in our reading.  So that has enabled us to make an early start. It has given me a taste for the business of reading books attentively, and making notes that will, I hope, make perfect sense to me when I read them back before our meeting later in the year to decide the long list. In due course publishers will nominate other works and the judges are obliged also to "call-in" extra books that have come to their attention. That is how that huge total number comes about.

I will blog from time to time. As the process develops I hope to have some thoughts worth sharing. What I cannot do, of course, is give a running commentary on what I think of the books that I am reading, much though I would like to.  If I feel enthusiastic about a title I love to share that with others, but this year I must observe a vow of silence. I will read your blogs with interest, hoping that the Man Booker Prize will once more demonstrate the public's huge appetite for good fiction.