What is your favourite book published in the last five years? Let us know in the comments below, I’ll put the nominations into a hat in a few days time, and then we’ll all read it together.

Easy.

Hopefully.

Of course, I’m aware that choosing just one might be hard. But I guess I could stretch to two. My various, delightful and multi-coloured experiences on the Not the Booker prize have also taught me that this process could be open to a certain amount of log-rolling. I did wonder about imposing certain rules to mitigate against ending up with someone’s best mate’s worstseller. I thought I might ask that you only nominate books that have been widely reviewed or have sold more than 500 copies. But that’s too hard to monitor – and I think that the best restriction should be that the book is more than one year old and still widely available. Besides, some of the very best books sell hardly anything at all – and the other thing I’ve learned from the Not the Booker is that it’s sometimes great to be surprised. I’m just going to go on trust that you’ll put forward something that you think everyone will benefit from reading. I’d also be very grateful if you could supply a small explanation of why this book matters to you – and why we should read it. Maybe we’ll find an as-yet-undiscovered future classic. Or maybe we’ll just end up looking at Jonathan Franzen. Either way, I’ll be happy.

Nominations will be printed out, put into a hat in a few days’ time, and I’ll report back with news on the winner. I can’t wait to see what happens!

Finally, a bit of forewarning: this month’s advance for democracy will be balanced up next month with a temporary retreat. One hundred years after it was first published, we’ll be returning to Ford Madox Ford’s Good Soldier. It’s one hell of a book, so you might want to get stuck in early.