Nobody likes lists

This column will not, at least this year, discuss your correspondent’s 10 favourite books of last year. This is because I have far too much respect for your time, and also the past year was not perhaps the most enjoyable in history, and nobody wants to remember it.

However, I fear that this act of reticence will be as isolated as it is splendid. At this time of year, one is perforce inundated by “best-of” lists. Everyone and their editor is convinced that we want to know exactly what they were reading this year. If you are of a cynical turn of mind, you might come to the conclusion that many of these lists betray nothing so much as the influence of the publishers in question. Others seem to be compiled purely with a view to ensuring that the compiler looks good.

I have two questions about these lists. The first is this: Are people really so short of things to read that they will want to take advice from a random magazine? I don’t think they are. It is genuinely rare, for example, to see someone on social media link to a year-end books list unless they, or a friend, a relative, or a client has written one of the books on it. Regular people may scan the list to play the “how many of these have I read / heard of” game, but they certainly aren’t waiting with bated breath and amazon.com open for any random Top 10 of 2020.

People do tend to be a little more interested, actually, in what is going to be released over the coming year. The rule for newspaper writing at the end of the year is “always look forward, not back”—  especially for years that are eminently forgettable, of which this past one is an excellent example. That should be a rule for December/ January books lists as well. If we chose to overlook the 12 gushing reviews of some publishers’ darling, then bunging it on a years-end list is not going to change our mind. Best to start afresh, and tell us which well-connected author will be reviewed 12 times next year.

I also wonder: Are authors all that pleased about inclusion in these lists as well? I mean I occasionally see on authors’ bios that they won this award or that. Less often, one hears they were on a shortlist or a longlist. But if someone tells you on their bio or their blurb that their book made some Best of 2020 list, you are forced to conclude that it won no other recognition whatsoever, and that tells a somewhat darker story than the author would like.

Besides, most of the time that I hear writers discussing lists that they are on, they are bemoaning the fact that someone else they abhor is on it as well. It is a dismaying truth that for any writer who receives such recognition will quickly examine who else has gotten it. After all, both being put on the same list implies that that person’s book is at least as good as their own. Thus being included on a year-end list with a colleague whose writing, manners, hairstyle, personality, and social media etiquette you detest can be considered a mortal insult.

Besides, why should a “best-of-the-year” list be about the books that were released that year? If the point of new books is to somehow illuminate the historical moment we are living through, then nothing conceptualised and written before March 2020 could possibly speak to the world that took shape over the rest of the year. Early in 2020, this column discussed novels about plagues and pandemics — some of them written centuries ago — and frankly those might have had more to say about our specific historical moment than any book released in 2020. To be properly useful, an end-of-year books list should be about the books that the columnist read over the year that seemed particularly apposite to our shared experience, not a lacklustre selection of those books published during 2020 that the columnist thinks are least likely to be forgotten before 2021 is done.

The question we should all ask ourselves, however, is which set of year-end lists — 2021? 2022? 2023? — will have books written primarily during this year of alarums, non-excursions and lockdowns. I wonder what sort of flavour they will give that year’s catalogue. And let us all hope that, by then, pandemic-year books will serve as gentle reminders of past trauma, not as a chronicle of a continuing ordeal. Here’s to a better 2021 — and 2022, and 2023.