Please Judge What I’m Reading

Ms. Jones, a former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, is at work on a memoir, “Bookish.”

I was well into adulthood before I learned that prestigious cultural awards are distributed not by some array of gods and muses but by real people. So when the Booker Prize Foundation released its longlist almost two weeks ago, I read it with pleasure, and I was struck by how prominently the award’s five judges featured in the announcement. There they are, most of them smiling beatifically in the photo on the Booker website and cradling two stacks of books, the proud result of months of curatorial labor and, presumably, high-minded sparring and arm-twisting.

Literary judges often take the brunt of critiques about prize giving in the arts, what with their inherent biases, their inescapable blind spots and the cliquish nature of the process by which they anoint winners. It’s........

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