Not the Booker prize 2014: the shortlist revealed

The votes are in. And since I'm guessing you're eager to see the shortlist, I'm going to cut straight to the chase. This year's shortlist consists of …

Simon Sylvester – The Visitors (Quercus) with 63 votes
Donna Tartt  – The Goldfinch (Little, Brown) with 39 votes
Tony Black – The Last Tiger (Cargo) with 39 votes
Louis Armand – Cairo (Equus) with 39 votes
Iain Maloney – First Time Solo (Freight books) with 37 votes
Mahesh Rao – The Smoke Is Rising (Daunt) - with 36 votes

This admirable selection was compiled with assistance from a few kind anonymous volunteers, the admirable AggieH, and yours truly. We all had slightly variant methods of counting, marking and judging eligibility, and there was the usual enjoyable confusion about the rules, and particularly the required length of second vote reviews. And yet, the top six was pretty much consistent across all the variant counting methods. These books were also consistently far ahead of the rest of the field.

As for that voting, I'm pleased to say that it was a bumper year. It was very impressive to see the huge number of people engaging with the competition, writing serious and passionate reviews and making their voices heard in favour of good literature. It was also hilarious to see the various methods employed to try to overcome our pesky democratic ideals. Duplicate reviews, apparent voting pacts between authors and their friends, woefully short reviews and painful misunderstandings of the rules all added to the froth and fun of the voting stage. Our experiment in literary republicanism remains as vital and energetic as ever – and that's just the way we like it.

Most importantly, the voting process has again produced an intriguing selection of books. I'm happy to say that I know next to nothing about most of them. I've read a little of The Last Tiger (and enjoyed it), otherwise four of the books on the list look set to expand the frontiers of my knowledge and hopefully introduce us all to some interesting new talent. The other, of course, is Donna Tartt's Pulitzer prize winner, The Goldfinch. The Goldfinch has clearly benefited from the huge popularity and fame of its author, some dedicated readers and from being a default second choice for people who hadn't heard of the rest of the books. The following comment wasn't typical, but wasn't entirely unusual: "Second vote for The Goldfinch not because it's better than the others, I just haven't read any of the others."

I'm not complaining! It's always interesting to see the cracks in our system – and I'm keen to read the book. Like everyone else on the planet, I loved The Secret History. It's also going to be fascinating to see how the other books on our list measure up against this Big American Novel.

On that note, we're now in for the best part of the process: the actual reading. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be tackling the novels in alphabetical order, by author (intelligent readers will have realised that this means Louis Armand is up first) and posting my thoughts on them at the rate of roughly one a week. I'm hoping as many people as possible will join me and post their own impressions before the polls close on 12 October. Not least because, at the end of the reading process, as well as a public vote, we're going to have a panel. You're all invited to take part. To qualify, you just have to read along with me, post plenty of reviews and opinions and, in true Not the Booker style, get yourself selected. Here's the relevant rule from our heart-stopping, house-rocking, earth-shaking, booty-shaking, history-making terms and conditions:

10: Three readers will be selected by the Guardian to form a panel of judges from those readers who have made substantial contributions to the discussion of the shortlisted books. The process by which these readers are chosen is left studiously vague and is at the Guardian's discretion. These judges undertake to read at least three of the six-book shortlist before the final judging meeting.

Sound like fun? Of course it does! And finally, to encourage participation, I'm very pleased to say we have five bundles of the shortlisted books to give away to the first five readers to post a comment containing a "Please may I have" below and to be nice about it. And if you do manage to end up in the top five, please send an email to Laura.Kemp@theguardian.com We can't track you down ourselves. Be nice to her too!