No, it's not the end of Big Brother (would that it were, for good), but the voting for the Booker of Bookers; again – sort of.

Fifteen years after Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was named Booker of Bookers, it's having to fight its corner again, like George Foreman climbing into the ring one last time, when all he really wants is to get on with selling low-fat methods of cooking.

The brains behind the world's greatest literary prize are of course calling it something else – but in short Midnight's Children is having this year to battle it out against five pretenders to the throne to win "Bestest Booker Ever, Ever, Ever".

When the new prize, being run this year to celebrate 40 years of the Booker, was announced, the BBC ran an interesting experiment with Midnight's Children and the five other books it is up against, including Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Nadine Gordimer's The Conversationist.

Handing them out around Perthshire village Comrie, it asked the villagers to cast their votes. They found all the books hard going, none more so than Rushdie's tome, but the project threw up a couple of interesting questions.

Chief among them was should I rescue my own copy from Bookshelf Number Five, the one in the cellar, and find a space for it on Bookshelf Number One – from where it has at least half a chance of promotion to the premier position of bedside table and from there to actually being read?

It also reminded me of the comments of Bestest Booker Ever billion-to-one outsider Nick Hornby. The populist, sorry, popular, author criticised the Booker judges for their high-falutin' ways.

Paraphrasing aside, what he said is: "I think the Booker sets a tone of a certain kind of literary writer. I think there is a general desire to read good books. People read books on the way to work and before they go to bed. We've all had that terrible feeling that you're making no impression on a novel at all and you're 30 pages in and there's 472 pages left and you've been reading it for three weeks already." Hornby was saying people shouldn't have to work hard to enjoy their literature.

The writer has a point – up to a point. At the minute, as usual, I have several books on the go. I'm re-reading Year of the King, a brilliant memoir by Antony Sher, a collection of his diaries from the time he played Richard III for the RSC. I'm also dipping into Terry Pratchett's latest adventure novel Making Money. There is a difference.

Hornby kind of missed the point that Comrie understood. The Booker rewards the literature that enhances and enriches our lives, not the quick hatches into temporary happiness we escape through from time to time.

A home-made roast dinner takes ages to make. But it tastes a lot better than a Big Mac. Doesn't it? You decide.