Everyday Canvas

Top Ten Lists

Prompt: It was said in "The Joy in the Lines That Leap Off the Pages" in the New York Times by Dwight Garner that he did not mind writing year-end top ten lists because forced choices lead to soul searching. How do you feel about top ten lists? Are they helpful? A waste of time? Do you find yourself creating lists throughout the year?

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I do create lists for everything and anything under the sun. They are not necessarily top ten, but they serve me; they are, therefore, biased toward my liking. They are not for other people. For example, I have a short list of authors whose books I won’t read, only because I found they either wrote very badly (my opinion) or got on my nerves by not completing the main plot in a story just to write another book in the series. This is a highly personal list and one I’ll never let anyone else see. The simple reason is: I might be wrong, and I probably am, as an author develops over the years, but it is my own biased list and it is my time I am protecting.

As to the top ten lists published by people who read or know a lot, I still take them with a grain of salt for the reason that making such lists can adversely affect my personal decision-making. If I trusted such a list fully, I would have to let go of my own likes and dislikes. Then some of those lists may be in existence not because of the value of the items on the lists but because of the listmaker's prejudice toward one product or one line of thought or another.

The key to making a smart decision is giving oneself the time to gather all the information needed, and a confident, proactive approach with a trustworthy method. Then, in the areas where one is totally ignorant, a top ten list could help a person if that person is willing to take someone’s else’s opinions as his own, be it temporarily until he or she gains enough knowledge on the subject to decide for himself. For example, I trust the doctors to favor some medications over others, even if I know they, too, may be biased, but I don’t have their know-how and experience on the subject and neither do I have the time and energy to study medicine at my age. I’ll also trust my plumber’s advice on his faucets list, for the same reason.

Still, in general, I don’t look at top ten lists especially when it comes to books, and I’ve always wondered why our local library has on its wall the best-seller list of the New York Times. Who says the journalist who put together that list has read everything and anything under the sun to arrive at such a decision? Those books that sell the most are not necessarily the best or literary, and I have heard of a case where a rich person, decades ago, bought all the volumes of the book his beloved wrote, causing a sell-out of its first edition. As in this example, anything other than good writing can sell a book, and I think our librarians should know better.