By JEREMY DAUBER [More Intelligent Life] – For me there’s nothing that doesn’t love a list. Not of chores, mind you, but of books, films, records and so on. Show me a set of titles branded as “The Top Fifty Novels of the Nineteenth Century” or “The 42 Greatest Singles of the Motown Era” and my fingers practically reach of their own accord towards my Amazon account or Rhapsody playlist. I suspect I’m not alone, given the way such lists choke the web like kudzu. Nor am I the only one who has stashed away files of these lists, ambitiously started, rarely completed. But based on the attestations of my wife, my friends and everyone else I know, I may be more assiduous about list-following than most.
Looking at the books double-stacked on shelves in my office, I can check off their provenance one by one: New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010; 500 Essential Graphic Novels; Harold Bloom’s guide at the end of The Western Canon; the awards list at the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards; and the National Yiddish Book Centre’s 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature. The stacks include the occasional recommendation of a friend or an impulse buy, but those are the exceptions to the list-derived rule.
Recently my enabler of choice has been the “1001” series from Quintessence Editions, which list the top 1001 things you “must” see, read, listen to, play golf at, etc, before you die. These are big, honking volumes—the “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”, for example, comes in at 960 pages.
Continued at More Intelligent Life | More Chronicle & Notices.
