One number, recalculated every time you read.

The arithmetic

Every July the Booker longlist appears — a Booker Dozen, twelve or thirteen novels, about seven weeks ahead of the shortlist. Anyone who has tried to read all of them has done the same sum in their head, badly, on a train: how many pages a day is that, really?

This site does the sum and keeps doing it. Total the pages across the books you haven’t finished, subtract what you’ve already read, divide by the days until the shortlist. That’s the number at the top of your tracker, and it moves every time you log a page — down when you have a good week, up when you don’t.

Where a book’s length isn’t known, it’s left out of the maths and flagged, rather than guessed at. A target built on an invented page count would be worse than no target. This year the deadline is 22 September 2026.

The ritual

Mark a book as reading. Log the page you’re on when you put it down. Mark it read when you finish — one tap, and the number above shifts to match. On a Kindle, where the page number is a rumour and the percentage is the only honest figure on the screen, type the percentage instead: the tracker converts it to a page and counts it the same as anyone else’s.

Then the other half of the game: call your own shortlist and name your own winner, before the judges do. Six books, one winner, no take-backs once the announcement comes. You find out how well you read the room at the same moment everyone else does.

Finished books leave the working list and collect at the foot of the page, where you put them in your own order — best at the top. It happens a book at a time, as each one lands, rather than as a verdict demanded at the end of the season, which is the only moment anyone can honestly compare two novels: right after the second one.

Joining part-way through is normal. Set where you are on the tracker marks what you’ve already read in one pass, and the daily target starts telling you the truth instead of assuming you began on announcement day.

The back catalogue

Beyond the current cycle there’s every Booker winner back to 1969 — 60 books across 57 years, including the three years the judges couldn’t choose and split the prize. Browsable by decade, and the obvious question attached: how many have you read?

Every winner · Every cycle, year by year

The honest bits

It’s free, and there are no ads. Some book links are affiliate links, which is how the site pays for itself — you can ignore them entirely and nothing about the tracker changes. No stars, no reviews, no feed.

Longlisted is an independent project. It isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Booker Prize Foundation — for the official announcements, judges and citations, go to the Official Booker Prize site.