Sarah Jessica Parker Read 153 Books as a Booker Prize Judge. How’s Your TBR Pile?

Sarah Jessica Parker is an outspoken book lover, but this year, the actress and publisher took it to a new level as a judge for the 2025 Booker Prize.

In a series of interviews for The New York Times, Parker, 60, shared her experience helping to choose the winner of the prestigious literary award. She secured the job by sliding into the Booker Prize’s Instagram account’s comments section and as part of the 2025 panel, spent nearly a year reading and deliberating on over 100 books alongside fellow judges Roddy Doyle, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power and Kiley Reid.

Parker told the Times that the process altered her reading habits, and along with it, her entire life. The publisher even skipped family engagements with her husband Matthew Broderick and their three children in order to tackle her towering TBR list.

“No one tried to compete with the Booker,” Parker said. “Anytime after dinner, when there was a discussion about what movie to watch, no one asked me. Everybody knew what I would be doing.”

Parker noted that her reading time also fell during press for her TV series And Just Like That…, which aired its final season in August. Parker kept a book with her during junkets, even though she knew there was “no way” she’d have time to read between interviews.

“So I didn’t get any reading done for four or five days, and I was really panicked because the last thing I wanted to do was rush books,” she said. “So I just didn’t sleep.”

Parker also felt “absolutely terrified” about narrowing down her favorite books — and sharing her thoughts with the rest of the judges’ panel.

“At our first meeting, I was so scared about talking about books with the other judges,” Parker explained. “These were Booker winners, long-or shortlisted authors, or people like Chris Power — professionals who spend their time critiquing, thinking and writing about books.”

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But it was while discussing David Szalay’s novel Flesh, which took home the Booker Prize, that Parker felt herself begin to relax.

“After that first conversation, I felt so much more comfortable,” Parker said. “It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t feel like I was defending my thesis. The theoretical, like many things in life, is much more scary than opening your mouth, and if someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

Now that the winner has been announced, Parker said that she’s returning back to her normal reading, including manuscripts for her book imprint SJP Lit. But some things she’s learned from her time as a judge have stuck with her.

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“I found I’m far harder on books now. I expect more, and I know it can be achieved because I’ve just read 153 books and a lot of them were great,” Parker said. “I think that’s good for me, because I have such a sentimental streak about writers. I have so much admiration for them.”

She’s previously spoken about what she looks for in books to publish at SJP Lit during an event at 92NY on Sept. 29. “We try to find books that we’re really excited about, that really wow us immediately,” Parker said at the time, adding that when reading for her imprint and the Booker, “I required of myself a kind of discipline about it that’s different than reading a screenplay, where you can give up [if] you think it just didn’t get better after page 30.”

Parker said that judging the Booker was the “experience of a lifetime.” She recalled the panel settling on the shortlist, which included the novels Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller.

“This is the kind of writing we should be celebrating, and these are the kinds of authors we should be announcing to the world,” Parker said.