I’ve been saving a link to an article about lists for about a week or so and in the meantime have also accumulated links to lists and I thought it would be fun to mash them together in one post. And then I was reminded of a book about lists, and well, who doesn’t love lists?
The article I was saving is The Lure of Lists by Jeremy Dauber. In it he exmines why we like lists so much. He comes at it from the proliferation of 1001 books that, it seems to me, all began with 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die in 2006, and which now appears to have been revised and updated in early 2010. That’s foul play if you ask me. I have the first book and to go and revise that list should be against the law or something. Publish another volume but call it “Another 1001 Books You Should Really Consider Trying to Get to Before You Die” or something like that.
Dauber’s article made me think of Umberto Eco and his Louvre exhibit and the companion book The Infinity of Lists. He did a really interesting interview in Spiegel when it came out. Dauber suggests we like lists because, among other things, they offer authority and order. Eco agrees lists provide order, or rather, the illusion of order, but he believes that ultimately, we make lists because we don’t want to die. An interesting idea with which I am inclined to agree. I mean, why else would I keep adding books to my TBR list that already is long enough for one lifetime and is beginning to extend into a second?
So now, some lists for you that will, perhaps, cause you to add a second or third lifetime to your own TBR list.
- As if TED’s 10-15 minute videos aren’t addicting enough, they have now gone and started making book lists. Blast those TED people!
- SF Signal has a list of 10 Literary Novels for Genre Readers. But I think it is an interesting list even if you aren’t a genre reader.
- Then there is Brain Pickings’ 7 Must-Read Books on the Future of the Internet. It has the likely suspects but a few I had also not heard of. To that I’d like to add another book that I found out about over the weekend, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. I am currently hold number 103 for it at my library which means I probably won’t get it until I am done or close to being done with school which isn’t bad timing.
- Finally, I think I may have posted this link before, but it is worth posting again. OCLC lists all kinds of lists that will keep you going for years and years.
Whew! That’s a lot of lists! And enough. For now.
Oh my goodness, I love lists. Now I have something to do this weekend: read lists! (and write to you! yes! I will!)
I adore lists. Do you know the Morton Grove Library lists which can be found at:
http://www.webrary.org/rs/FLbklistmenu.html
You could organise a dozen life time’s worth of reading around these.
Daphne, make a list and put me on it
Annie, oh my, I did not know about Morton Grove Library’s lists. They have so many! I am adding them to my list of lists. Isn’t it sad when you need a list to keep track of your lists?
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Cripes! I need another LIFE to read ALL the books I want to read……
Do you know about listophelia? A blog by Canadian author Amy Jones, with all posts written as lists. Great stuff.
http://listophelia.blogspot.com/
I also have the original 1001 books book–that’s quite an errata to add to the original, though the new titles added are much more multicultural. But it does feel like they somehow cheated. I love lists, too.
Thanks for this Stefanie BUT, you know, I’m starting to avoid lists. They are too compelling and you start measuring yourself up and failing every time. So, I say, down with lists … now, where’s my reading schedule? I know I have it here somewhere!
How interesting that we keep lists to stave off death. My parents are big list makers – before going on holiday my mother would have dozens of them. I suppose that’s a different sort of list, perhaps. I also have 1001 books to read before you die and I would like a supplementary addendum, to be added onto the book I already possess, not an updated version which is indeed cheating!
Helen, Yup, I’m going to need several lives.
Nathalie, I didn’t know about listophelia so I popped over for a look and what a fun blog it is! Thanks for the tip!
Danielle, multicultural titles are good to add, can’t deny that. They should have done a new book though instead of revising.
Whisperinggums, avoiding lists? My list making heart just skipped a beat
I totally understand how lists can make you feel like a failure. I used to check book lists obsessively against my reading and always came up short and always ended up feeling dismal and stupid. But somewhere along the way I had a mental shift and now those kinds of lists are only suggested reading and not required reading. And personal lists, except for the grocery list, are more ways to organize my goals and plans and aspirations and if I don’t cross everything off, well, it’s not the end of the world.
Litlove, isn’t Eco’s an interesting thought? I’m going to try and get a copy of the exhibition book through interlibrary loan and I hope he goes into more detail about it there. I have spent years trying to turn my husband into a list maker as a way to help him get organized. I’ve gotten him to make lists, he’s become quite good at it. Now I just have to get it him to actually do the things he puts on his lists!
Regarding the “genre” list: interestingly, not a single one of those books are marketed or sold in the any of the genre section at the bookstore. At this point, certain designations – “science fiction/fantasy”, “mystery”, “romance” – aren’t anything other than easy ways to sell product by grouping like things together.
I also strongly suggest that at least half of the books we have on our “Literature & Fiction” shelves could be marketed in the genre stacks without raising an eyebrow. “Shopaholic,” anyone? Anything by Anne Rice?
Several years ago Orson Scott Card wondered what it would do to people’s relationship with reading if there were no genres (at least when it came to fiction); if everything were simply marketed on the same shelves, alphabetically by author, period.
Well, after six years of selling this stuff, I think I can answer thus: that few people, if any, want to expand their literary horizons by taking a chance. Once your average reader decides he likes a Certain Thing, he wants more of that Certain Thing, or at least more of That Kind Of Thing. I plead guilty here. I’m a tough sell for something new, personally (though it wasn’t always that way).
Which means we need genres. I may not like them because it keeps excellent authors like Gene Wolf, Josephine Tey, and Georgette Heyer in the “critical” ghetto (um, where on second thought they’re probably better off anyway since I can think of no worse punishment for a book than to be championed and “appreciated” by the professors), but if we didn’t use them, we wouldn’t sell jack.
So: Long live genres! Long may they stand . . . and help us sell stuff!
Cameron, you make some interesting points about genre. I have often found myself complaining about how genre sort of ghettoizes literature and keeps people who are sure they don’t like science fiction, for instance, from discovering some very good books. I understand people want to read things similar to the books they already know they like. Do you, as a bookseller, ever recommend books to cumstomers that you think they will like that are in a genre they don’t read? And if so, what sort of response do you get?
I agree with you about revising the 1001 books book. How can you write a book with the title “1,001 Books to Read Before You Die” but not really mean it? It’s a tall order to begin with, but to add even more books to the list seems wrong!
Dorothy, heh, your comment about the first book not really meaning it made me laugh!