A difficulty for the Common Reader in search of a good book is the sheer quantity of noise in the fiction market. Far too much is of strikingly indifferent quality. Louise Doughty, a novelist and a Man Booker judge this year, read more than 100 titles in 2008 and says that her reaction to too many was, "Why would anyone want to publish this book?"

Which returns us to the question of why and how we read, and the elusive quality that distinguishes a good book from a bad one. Many of the most serious and interesting novels of 2008 have the exhilarating originality of high "literary" writing: Marilynne Robinson's Home; Michelle De Kretser's Booker long-listed The Lost Dog; Howard Jacobson's Act of Love; Philip Hensher's Northern Clemency, which was shortlisted for the Booker; and volumes of short stories by Lorrie Moore and Shena Mackay. While all are intellectually demanding, they are also seductively readable and in that sense have more in common with well-crafted popular fiction, such as Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, Simon Montefiore's Sashenka, Sebastian Faulks's "Bond" novel, Devil May Care, than with the hapless slew of mediocre writing with literary pretentions continuing to clog the fiction lists.

There is, at first glance, not much of a match of minds between Richard and Judy's Amanda Ross and Virginia Woolf. Yet in her Common Reader essays, Woolf insisted that readers need "trivial, ephemeral books" as well as masterpieces. So at the end of 2008 we find our Common Reader, emboldened by this thought, uncowed by Self's disdain for her middlebrow tastes, stepping boldly through the door of an independent bookshop (set up by a disaffected refugee from a big chain), carrying her jute bag-for-life within which Elizabeth Jane Howard's comforting domestic drama Love All lies cosily lodged next to Self's disturbing quartet of novellas, Liver. Who's to say which will provide the more worthwhile experience? The common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices must decide...