Reflections on keeping a top-books list
I've been maintaining a list of my top 100 books for approximately four years now. Some notes on the process:
- The process has been pleasant, I enjoy reviewing the list, and I've never regretted spending the time on it. I'm still pro-ranking-things.
- I often rank books I've just read highly and move them down later. This appears to be a Hofstadter phenomenon: awareness of it does not cause me to correct for it enough, at least on average.
- Usually this is less a matter of my revising a judgment of the more objective qualities of a book, and more a matter of my being bad at predicting how much a book will stick with me.
- All evidence suggests that a book's sticking with me depends even more on social factors than I would have guessed. When I review the books that have fallen over time, they're ones that were not recommended to me by close friends, that I didn't discuss extensively during and after reading, and so on.
- This doesn't mean that solitary reading is less valuable than I thought it was: I don't plan to stop. It does mean, I think, that other people are more important than I knew to the process of specific books' staying meaningful to me for years.
- Having a top-100 list makes it easier to stop reading a just-OK book.
- But I don't always abandon books I think have no chance of making the top 100. Reading them, rather, has a different kind of pleasure and value. A book about punctuation, however lovely, is unlikely to crack the top 100, and there's a sense in which this made the reading of it more enjoyable.
- When I was reading Middlemarch (currently #2), I occasionally wondered if I had a new #1. I've simply lived with Pride and Prejudice too long and happily for another Victorian novel to overtake it, I think. Perhaps in five or ten years Middlemarch will be #1.