List Mania

In Today's Times, Virginia Heffernan writes:

Blessed are the list makers, with their sharp pencils, their certainties, their mix of words and numbers. Walt Whitman made lists. Nabokov made lists. Last year, while declaring in Time magazine that “literary lists are basically an obscenity,” Tom Wolfe admitted to having made many in his life, and then introduced a new one, ranking the best novels in the world.

In 1999, when lists featuring the best and worst whatevers of the last hundred or thousand years were appearing all over, A. S. Byatt wrote on the Times Web site that she loved lists. She was defending the Modern Library’s lists of the Top 100 books of the century, to which she had contributed, arguing that the public outcry over the partiality of the lists was in fact a squeal of pleasure. “All list makers enjoy the misery of indignation about the omitted essentials,” she wrote. Lists, in her view, couldn’t go wrong. Near the top of a list of things that she believed would define the third millennium, she put lists themselves.

Heffernan describes our fascination with lists and how the Internet has enabled this addiction. She recommends checking out the lists on Amazon. We recommend this blog.