Lists Can Reveal Who We Are

I don't care about rankings, but what's selected is often illuminating

I am on the record here, there, and elsewhere as a non-believer in the meaning of ranked lists of “best” books. “Best” is inevitably subjective, and every time I run across one of these lists - including the inevitable end-of-year “best of” lists - I want to say: Best? Sez who?

It’s not that I’m against being opinionated about books. I would think the nearly 1000 pieces I’ve published here and in my Chicago Tribune books column would indicate otherwise, but releasing a list so we can argue over whether or not the books on the list are the books that should be on the list, or which books should be on the list that aren’t on the list, or which books belong on the list aren’t on the list doesn’t do much for me.

Except the content of the lists themselves are often quite interesting. I know I’m not the only one of my particular vintage who remembers this gem:

The first edition of The Book of Lists was published in 1977 (when I was seven years old), and I think I just about memorized the thing. The volume was really just a collection of random lists that had nothing in common other than they were lists. Unlike The Guinness Book of World Records which was organized under a rationale, The Book of Lists could have anything often mundane topics like “most popular dog breeds,” but also including (as per Wikipedia) “people suspected to be Jack the Ripper.” I remember a list that was something like “most admired men/women” with Burt Reynolds and Jackie (Kennedy) Onassis winding up at the top.

The absolute rankings are less interesting than what the totality of a given list says about our culture, or the fact that we decide certain things are worth making lists about.

Normally I’m happy to let ranking of best books pass by as an unremarked upon link in the middle part of the newsletter, but a recent feature from the Los Angeles Times on marking the 30th anniversary of their Festival of Books “The 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years,” started my wheels churning.

I noticed a few things.

These books are good

Scrolling down from number 30 to number 1, I repeatedly said to myself “Oh yeah, nice one,” or “Oh, I remember reading that.”

Number 30 is David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, and I could tell you the road trip my wife and I were when we listened to the audio version. Dave Cullen’s Columbine (#25) his exhaustive reportage of the mass shooting that kicked off our age of mass shootings still haunts me. Nickel and Dimed (#8) by Barbara Ehrenreich is as relevant today as it was when it was published in 2001. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (#6) is one of the great works of reportage of my lifetime.

The Number 1 selection The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is a narrative history that essentially captures the entire story of post-War America, the forces that continue to roil the country today, the roots of persistent injustices that the Trump administration seems determined to intensify.

The only book that makes me cringe a little is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (#20), which by itself is fine, but which reminds me of a writer who has, in my opinion, become high on his own supply as a feted all-purpose intellectual, who is now, unfortunately frequently, proudly, publicly wrong.

These books prove The Biblioracle is real

Calling myself “The Biblioracle” has always been a joke, but also, not entirely. I have a pretty decent track record of both recommending books and alerting others to writers they may not know but are worth their time.

When I saw Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essay collection, Thick, pop up at number 28, I was thrilled because it was unexpected, not because the book isn’t great, but because as successful as it was (National Book Award Finalist), it’s also a pretty challenging (in several senses of the word) read.

I was thrilled because I think Cottom is a hugely important voice in the world, but also because the selection of Thick shows how correct I am when it comes to judging books and writers. This is the final paragraph from my column on Thick, published January 6, 2018, two days prior to the book’s release:

I read “Thick” as a kind of manifesto. It is the story of Cottom’s life – “pregnant at thirty,” “divorced at thirty-one,” “lost at thirty-two, as she opens the title essay – but it is not only memoir. Ten years after being lost, she is a PhD holder, a widely respected professor, scholar, and writer. “Thick” serves an announcement of someone who is ready to assume her full voice in public, the type of voice which society often refuses to make room for because it challenges so many defaults.

Cottom has only gone on to bigger and better things since, entirely unsurprising events to anyone who has read her work, but I can claim to be an early and proud champion.

These books demonstrate the (thankfully) diminished influence of “TED Talk culture”

I will admit that there was a time when I was rather enthusiastic about the world as it was made to seem through the lens of TED Talks. A typical TED talk is fundamentally explanatory, an attempt to break through mystery and return with a rational answer. I have no great objection to rationality, but many of these explanations either rely on a particular conception of what is good and desirable that comes from a specific - for lack of a better term, neoliberal - lens. The notion that we can fix the world through nudges or mindset changes, rather than actually redistributing resources or making sure those without power are heard is attractive because it flatters the people who write books that would find favor in a forum like a TED Talk.

The only book with even a whiff of TED is Sapiens, while other huge selling, very influential books like Freakonomics and Thinking, Fast and Slow are nowhere to be found.

Freakonomics was not a TED Talk, but it is a good example of the mindset, economists who are going to explain the world through mechanistic operations that could be revealed by proper reading of “the data.” Not even mentioning the various problems with the original methodology and analysis, I of the book, I now recognize that the entire world view as a way to understand and address our problems is misguided.

I doubt this was a conscious choice by the folks who compiled the list, but it’s interesting to consider how throughly these sorts of books have fallen out of favor.

These books are diverse

There’s diversity in terms of genre - memoir (Solito #15), The Year of Magical Thinking #2) narrative history (The Devil in the White City #24), political history (Master of the Senate #16), first person reportage (Into Thin Air #9), third-person reportage (Random Family) sociology (Evicted #4), graphic memoir (Fun Home #10), science (The Sixth Extinction #29) and even advice (Stephen King’s On Writing #14). (There’s multiple example of each of these categories, I just haven’t listed them all.)

But also, these are works of diverse voices. We’ve got old white guys Robert Caro and Stephen King and a stylish white lady in Joan Didion.. We have Black and Hispanic writers. A number of the books (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks #11, Men We Reaped #13, Between the World and Me #3, focus on the stories of minority communities. I’m surprised that Trump hasn’t signed an executive order condemning the list.

Given that the list is pegged to the last thirty years, I think it shows what can happen once the barriers to hearing from non-majority voices have been lifted and these stories are no longer suppressed. Citizen: An American Lyric (#19) by Claudia Rankine is a book that directly challenges a culture that may have codified equal rights for all, but which still seeks to tear down and discount blackness.

One way we can look at this list is to notice the books by Rankine, Cottom,, Coates, Wilkerson, Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Alexander, Javier Zamora, Alison Bechdel, and how these books are perceived as threats by people at the highest levels of the federal government.

This isn’t new, and it’s not just the federal government. Back in 2014 when I was teaching at the College of Charleston, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was chosen as our campus reads book. A South Carolina state legislator objected to one of the drawings in the book of a college-age Bechdel having sex with another woman, calling it “pornographic.” The legislature moved to punish the school by withholding the funding that went towards the campus reads program. The resulting hullabaloo got the attention of Bechdel and the creators and performers of the Fun Home musical which was just about to move from off-Broadway to Broadway. Having a break in their schedule, they came to campus and performed a stripped-down version of the musical for a very happy audience, including yours truly.

In the end, quality and art could not be denied. I think that’s still true, and I appreciate the LA Times giving me this list as a way to remind me what we stand to lose if we don’t keep fighting.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Eoin Higgins new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I’ll have a bonus Q&A with Higgins coming Tuesday this week.

The Los Angeles Times also named the 30 best fiction books of the last 30 years.

Lydia Kiesling, author of Biblioracle-approved Mobility wrote about her decision to not speak at Sweet Briar College after learning of their recent decision to exclude trans women.

Isabelle Allende gets the long form interview treatment at the New York Times.

It’s not timely, but it’s relevant to today’s newsletter. In 2020 I interviewed Tressie McMillan Cotton for Public Books.

Amazon tried to crash yesterday’s Independent Bookstore Day, and readers said, no thanks. Maris Kreizman writes in honor of the day at LitHub. For me, every day is Independent Bookstore Day.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is well known for its lists. In fact, we published a whole book of them which I helped edit. Enjoy this more recent list from Carlos Greaves, “1925 or 2025?”

Recommendations

1. Conscious by Annaka Harris
2. The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts by Joan Biskupic 3. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
4. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
5. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

Diane P. - Plano, TX

This is a classic book that is unlike any other and I think Diane will appreciate its unique qualities Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

1. Mediations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman
2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
3. Trust by Hernan Diaz
4. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
5. The Punch by Noah Hawley

Ryan M., - Ferndale, MI

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane feels like the right call for Ryan.

One of the best things about publishing a book is being invited to have interesting conversations with people that are recorded and then shared with the world. My conversation with Mark Hurst on his Tectonic show was one of my favorites. Mark’s reflections on our conversation and what it means to have this AI technology in the world are well worth reading. And if you click that link, you’ll find another link to my conversation with Mark.

I hope everyone had a good Independent Bookstore Day. Maybe consider making it Independent Bookstore Weekend?

See you Tuesday with that Q&A with Eoin Higgins.

Later, gators,

JW
The Biblioracle