The government's decision on the fabled five economic tests is due on June 9, and, contrary to all expectations, is being touted as a joint cabinet decision. So are cabinet ministers jumping with joy at this victory for representative democracy? Maybe so, but the flipside is they've got some serious homework to do.

Whatever plans they may have had for leisurely weekends - maybe watching the FA Cup final, visiting Cannes, doing a spot of ironing - have been dashed. Gordon Brown requires that by Monday morning they read, digest, understand and all but memorise 2,500 pages of complex Treasury analysis in preparation for individual cross-examination.

Assuming they open their 2ft stack of papers at 6pm on Friday evening, and reach the final full stop by 8am on Monday morning, the diligent minister must read 40 pages of dense economic analysis per hour. That's without either eating or sleeping - and bear in mind that even our elected representatives are only flesh and blood.

Even if they can manage it, what does this task actually mean? To help put it in some perspective, here are some literary equivalents to Gordon's two-and-a-half stone epic.

At a paltry 1,300 pages in total, even the slowest ministerial reader could get through the first four Harry Potter books - and still have time to hunt for the next one in a Suffolk field. And the Lord of the Rings should hold no fear for the cabinet either: the entire Middle Earth saga (1,000 pages) could be digested at least twice over before the Jag arrives on Monday.

But that's kid's stuff (and might ruin the films). Don't forget we're talking about the Treasury here - they're hardly famous for writing unputdownable bestsellers. So perhaps a fairer comparison might be made with the complete prose works of James Joyce - that's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and the truly incomprehensible Finnegans Wake. Like all the best macroeconomic tracts, they get harder with every page, and at only 2,000 pages, there would still be time to read the York notes for each.

An obvious comparison is with Tolstoy's bedside brick, War and Peace, which weighs in at an easily manageable 1,400 pages. But that's barely a Saturday afternoon.

Of course, it's possible that the cabinet minister in question might want to stick to the topic by reading some classic economic theory. John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money could keep them busy - but only if they read it six-and-a-half times.

Then there's the epic's epic, Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Now this one could prove a challenge. At a staggering 3,500 pages, even the briefest translation of this literary mammoth might have to wait until time allows. A bank holiday, perhaps?

Given all this, it seems almost as if Gordon didn't want the cabinet to manage.

· Martin Nicholls has a first-class degree in English literature from Edinburgh University. He has never read Proust.