Lists: Who Even Cares?

It’s that time of the year when everyone publishes Top 10 or Top 25 kind of lists. It’s no different with book lists “coming soon to a friend’s Facebook wall near you”, as Michelle Dean puts it.

In case of book lists, Dean is horrified to see the number of books being mentioned: NPR had 250, the New York Times Book Review had 100! As Dean says:

“The hugeness of these lists betrays something: their uselessness.”

Who even scrolls past the Top 25 (at most), she asks? And so:

“It feels like the work of marketers, not of people who care about identifying good books.”

I agree with Dean but wonder, how many of us really read books on topics outside our normal area of interest anyways? Well ok, even if you’re the exception, I’m betting that is still a very tiny fraction of what you read.

In the age of Amazon and Goodreads, who even looks up these lists anyway? Aren’t we far more likely to read the “People who bought/liked this book also bought/read…” recommendations since they align with our preferences anyway?

Besides, when I do want to read something outside my usual haunts, I prefer being able to read a detailed analysis of the book and, preferably, a decent sized extract from it as well before I take the plunge.

Like I asked earlier, who even looks up these lists anyway?