How to read a list

Debbie Jacob

I DON’T recall ever seeing anything written about how to interpret a list. We talk about analysing literature, but not lists. That’s too bad because lists offer many clues about the people who write them.

Even grocery lists can be a revelation. They can tell us how health-conscious or frugal a person is. You might be able to tell if the person writing the list is creative or patriotic by the items listed to buy. Are they for complex recipes from scratch, imported items, down-to-earth or unusual products? Lists tell a story. They organise us too.

I’m not great at writing grocery lists, but I’m a fan of book lists. People never agree on book lists, and some lists are more controversial than others. There’s no way they can be objective. Compiling a book list means finding books you feel are well written, with subjects that you consider important or appeal to you. Everything about them is subjective. No one who writes those lists could possibly read all of the books that could make a list.

Book lists are usually categorised by theme or genre. The problem is that most books no longer fit in a single genre.You might think that bestseller lists are the most objective lists because they’re measured by book sales, but that’s tricky too. A new release backed by plenty of publicity can cause a book to soar to the top of a besteller list and overshadow a book that still has steady readership. Bestseller lists just measure a moment in time.

Then there are people with erudite reading preferences who gravitate to books published by small presses and literary fiction that mainstream publishers don’t take chances on. Those books make great reading, but they don’t appear on mainstream book lists.

I use book lists to discover new books, set reading goals and learn about how my own reading interests compare with others. I don’t take them personally or beat myself up when I come across a list that doesn’t reflect how much I have not read.

Take, for instance, The Los Angeles Times newspaper’s 30 Best Nonfiction Books in the Last 30 Years published on April 14. I should have fared well on this list since about 80 per cent of my reading is non-fiction, but I read exactly one-third of the books on the list, which you can check out at the link below:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2025-04-14/the-30-best-nonfiction-books-of-the-last-30-years

Here are the books I read:

1. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epicc Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

3. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

5. On Writing: A Memoir of Craft by Stephen King

6. Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A Caro

7. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

8. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

9. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

10. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

My list includes biographies, crime, history, and memoirs, books about migration, natural history and politics. Of the books I read on that list, I would have put 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9 on my own list of best books in the last 30 years and add some other great books I discovered. I’ll make my list of best non-fiction books in a future column.

The LA Times's list was quite eclectic. It included essays, natural history, sexuality, crime, race, memoirs, graphic memoirs and politics. Books about race, borders and migration figured heavily on the LA Times’s list. Those would be issues that hit home in Los Angeles.

Every book list should validate some of the reading choices you made and inspire you to discover new books. They’re guides – a fun way to discover books and see what the media and other people think about books creating a buzz. They’re fun and thought-provoking. Analyse them to determine the message they convey about reading preferences.

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