My TBR list is over 1,000 titles long …

That’s To Be Read, of course. Some – too many – I already own. Others haven’t been bought. There simply are too many books, too little time.

So why on earth would I stop what I’m doing to take a close look at the Booker Prize longlist, released today? As I do every year.

Who are book prizes for?

And does a nomination bump titles towards the front of my ridiculous queue? 

This post isn’t about literary snobbery. I’ve read fewer than you might imagine, and some of those were imposed on me.

1982 winner? Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark. It was a set text at secondary school.

2004 winner? Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty. A set text at university.

The only one I remember buying in part because it was a Booker winner is 2008’s The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.

I was at a railway station bookshop and needed a fix, I was in a hurry, and the sticker on the front seduced me. I’m very glad of that, actually – of the three, it’s the only one I recommend to others.

But that’s an outlier. My annual curiosity seems to be more about looking for happy coincidences rather than direction.

Not all readers are the same, of course.

I have a friend who uses it as her main TBR list for the coming year. She can’t be the only one – winners often seem to report commercial advantages which go way beyond the prize money (currently £50,000, with a niggardly-sounding £2,500 for shortlisted texts). Dig into the interviews, and authors report that sales go up; new markets are opened; perhaps translations – even film rights. OK, I see these could be worth much more than the monetary value of the prize now.

Yet, something niggled – call me cynical, but I’ve always been a little suspicious of panels. And lists, to be honest. Not because I think they’re dishonest, but because reading isn’t a democratic activity. The novel that changes my life may leave everyone else cold.

Maybe I’m in the minority. But – again- only one person I know is deliberately buying Bookers.

Stopping to think about how I find books, I ended up with the following loose rules:

1. Previous experience of the author
2. A recommendation from someone whose taste I trust
3. A connection to a favourite genre or work I
4. Some type of personal connection with the author – attending a reading; listening to interviews; once – thrillingly, because the author was an ex-student
5. Idle Browsing
6. Winning the Booker

The Booker doesn’t tell me what to read next.

It reminds me what is being talked about.

Those aren’t the same thing.

The books that have mattered most to me have usually arrived by quieter routes: a trusted recommendation, a chance encounter in a bookshop, an enthusiastic conversation, an essay that refused to leave me alone.

This year’s longlist might add another name or two to my impossible reading list.

Whether they’ll ever reach the top of it is another matter entirely.

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Join the conversation: tell me about your TBR pile, and about your rules for choosing what to read next. How influential are prizes like the Booker in your reading life?