Because it's there

Stephen Phelan, you're a better man than Gunga Din. Or Hurree Babu.

"With hindsight, I realise that I was naive when I set out to read all the novels on this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist in the space of a single week. I accepted the assignment for reasons of intellectual vanity. Not even the great writer and critic Gore Vidal had ever pulled off such a wheeze, although he did once famously go through the top 10 American bestsellers and write a characteristically imperious essay about the experience.
Now, it would be my turn to become a book group of one, a judging panel unto myself. I would read 17 novels in seven days . Starting the week as diligent as a librarian’s apprentice, I would end it half-blind, sad-faced and walking into walls, like a pit pony down a Chinese coal-mine."