“The list is the origin of culture,” said Umberto Eco back in 2009. “It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.” As curator of an exhibition of lists at the Louvre, the Italian novelist had skin in the game at the time, but his point remains pertinent in an ever more infinite world.
How, for instance, could one hope to comprehend the scope of a UK publishing industry in which more than 660m books – physical and digital – are sold in a single year, including about 180,000 new titles? The answer, insofar as there is one, is to arrange them into lists, from publishers’ catalogues, via library and bookshop shelves, all the way down to personal must-reads gleaned from friends or other trusted sources.
But for many people, reading books takes the sort of concentrated free time that only exists on holiday. Hence the familiar pattern of cut-out-and-keep newspaper reading lists at Christmas and the start of the summer. Hence, too, the tradition of publishing the longlist of the UK’s Booker prize in the final week of July.
There is, of course, a manipulation of aspiration involved in these timings that bears comparison with the January capitalisation of the fitness industry on new year resolutions. They offer a big advertising opportunity. But this does not invalidate their role in chopping the vast expanse of culture up into digestible portions.
The question of what size these portions should ideally be has a whole science of its own attached to it. Research suggests not only that a wide range of choice makes people unhappy, but that the human brain can only handle seven alternatives before it feels overwhelmed. In terms of the Booker, it’s only at shortlist stage that the surge in sales for which the prize is known begins to appear. While it may be interesting to see the field laid out by the Booker 13 – as the longlist is known – most readers wait until there are only six contenders before investing their precious time, energy and money in them.
In lists that are not associated with choice, however, different rules apply. One of the most enduringly popular book lists on the Guardian’s own website was the 100 best novels written in English. In the 1,000-odd responses that poured in after its publication in 2005, you can see respondents using it as a whetstone to sharpen their sense of their own reading identity, and their conception of how the world really is, or should be. This is both a trivial party game and something more profound.
Over millennia, lists have stitched themselves into fiction itself – from Homer’s slain heroes in The Iliad to the contents of Leopold Bloom’s kitchen drawers in James Joyce’s Ulysses. They make two appearances on this year’s Booker longlist. In Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, an astronaut unconsciously conscripts a childhood list-making habit to fortify herself as her spacecraft descends from orbit.
In Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, a despairing conservationist soothes an existential crisis by enumerating all the white things in her room: “Lists like this show how much one really does have, on those days one falls into thinking of life – bedroom, relationships, intellectual life, spirit – as empty.” The smallest of lists can contain the biggest of themes.
• This article was amended on 6 August 2024. An earlier version said that there were 660m physical books sold in a year in the UK. In fact that figure also included digital books.
