In my house there are many Post-it notes filled with half-remembered quotes, flashes of inspiration, film lines, song lyrics, lists of errands, engagements, to-buys, to-dos. I’m always finding them, these meeting places of my dream and real worlds, curling at the edges on my bedside table, resting against a framed photo of my children at their most gorgeously carefree, or stuck on a windowpane, their neon colours fading, their urgency lost.

In many of them I sound a bit mad. And in a way, as objects, they double as reminders that contemporary adult life is mad. The hypertextuality of the internet has slipped its virtual bonds, and more than ever we jump from obligations to hobbies to ideas to chores to politics to family WhatsApp groups, as lightly as if we were switching tabs. Online we are overstimulated and frenetic, and on earth we are overworked and harried. Our attention is rarely not split.

If this is a kind of madness, then what is the cure?

This time last year, I would not have guessed the answer would come in the form of another major time commitment. Reading 128 works of translated fiction as an International Booker Prize 2026 judge roughly equated to finding four or five extra hours in my day, every day, for half a year. Friends would ask me if I’d lost my mind when I spelled it out to them, and feebly I would quote W.G. Sebald back at them: ‘It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane’. 

But other words came to me, too, like Franz Kafka’s in a letter to his editor and biographer Max Brod: ‘A nonwriting writer is a monster inviting madness’. Would I become a non-translating translator? Why was I electing to curtail my translation time, to further divide myself, to court madness?

The answer is that, for me, reading disorders the state of mind in the right ways. First, it is the most reliable form of escapism I know, and never more so than when I read books about lives and worlds and situations removed from my own, which happens more often when I read in translation. Readers who regularly follow the International Booker Prize will already know that it promises an extra element of escapism precisely because it focuses on stories imagined elsewhere, literature that in most cases algorithms and search engines would not suggest to you.

Reading for the International Booker Prize this year has led me to new authors and translators who are absolutely to my taste, but who, precisely because of my own shuttered notion of what my taste was, I would never have discovered if they hadn’t gone through this prize. My fellow judge, the writer Troy Onyango, recently said the same of one of his favourite ever books, 2021 winner, At Night all Blood is Black, by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis. 

Reading also alters the state of mind in that it allows you to shed the burden of your own identity, to become someone else, and to shake off if not all of life’s pressures (we need characters under pressure), then certainly your life’s pressures. When you do come back to yourself, it’s usually a wiser version that greets you, better equipped to face those pressures. Reading on such a regular basis as a judge, I repeatedly had the feeling that I no longer solely existed in my life, I co-existed in the worlds of those novels and short stories – still a divided self, but sublimely rather than raggedly so.

Readers might also recognise the mind-altering sensation of a good book bending and stretching time: you can read for 20 minutes on a commute and cross continents; you can read for six months and remain deeply absorbed in the action of one day. How seductive a trick of the mind this is. You think you have no time? Make some, for a novel or short story, and watch it double, triple… 

But where, precisely, to ‘make some’?

The answer will of course depend on readers’ own circumstances, on your personal hour-devouring monsters. My biggest ones, currently, are work and my young children. For others, it might be a social media habit, obsessing over the news, or more crucial care responsibilities, health issues, financial constraints, or problems of access. 

Having found quite a lot of time this year for reading, here is some cautiously tendered advice, hopefully feasible for most people who want to read more. It also happens to be one method by which I not only read but also engaged with every one of this year’s 128 submissions.

1. Write on a load of Post-it notes the word ‘READ’.
2. Walk around your house and leave a note wherever you find signs of your divided attention – from the dirty sock piles to the unfinished painting, from the desk to the dosette box.
3. Repeat Stage 2, leaving books instead of Post-its.
4. Get on with life, stopping to read whenever you encounter a note (a chapter, page, or passage can do radical good).
5. On yet more Post-it notes, write down any lines that you love, or that chafe, or make you laugh. 

Toni Morrison, who had her own time constraints as a single working mother of two sons, recalled in an interview the moment she decided to streamline her endless to-do list. On a fresh piece of paper, she wrote down only what she thought ‘if I didn’t do it, I would die’. For her those two things were raising her sons and writing books. 

One talks of dying, the other of going mad, but Morrison’s and Sebald’s cautions feel consistent: do not risk denying yourself what is essential. If you’re reading this article, it might just be that reading, at least at some point in your life, has felt essential. I myself will never again take for granted the fact that I do have time, somewhere in the day, to pick up a book and uncover more worlds, more time, more selves.

Now that we’re coming to the end of the judging process, I’m also curious about how past International Booker Prize judges found the time to read more, and what they got out of it. I open a new tab, half formulate the question, and last year’s chair of judges, Max Porter, pops up. 

‘I’m profoundly enriched by it. And also going a bit mad, which is no bad thing.’