The Tyranny of the Best-Of List: On Navigating Book Lists with OCD

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said as middle school me took a seat in my church’s drab, windowless confessional. Opposite our parish priest, I uncrumpled a piece of paper that contained two lists: One for all of the sins I had committed; the other for all of the ways I wished to be better. Having attended Catholic school for most of my young life, I understood that confession was supposed to grant me forgiveness for all of my sins, including those I forgot to confess. Yet like many people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or “OCD,” I feared those things that might be left unlisted or unsaid. People say it is better to face the devil you know, but these were the devils I didn’t know—the ones that resisted retention, like liquid that slips through one’s fingers before falling into the entropic unknown.

Even for people who don’t have OCD, list-making can be immensely satisfying and at times irresistible. Research tells us that making lists frees up precious cognitive resources, allowing us to focus on the most urgent tasks at hand, while rewarding us with a dopamine hit whenever we cross off an important or long-awaited to-do. Set against the so-called “media apocalypse,” annual roundups, cultural “eras,” astrological signs, and personality categorizations like the Enneagram have become lexiconic touchpoints, reflecting a human impulse to define what is “canon” as well as a uniquely modern impulse to curate one’s brand.

For book lovers, lists can serve as a special form of motivation and connection. “I love lists—not necessarily for the lists themselves but for the conversations they start,” says Sara Hildreth, a former high school English teacher and founder of the popular Bookstagram, Fiction Matters. This summer, the book world went particularly bananas when The New York Times published its 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List—an amalgamation of the reviews and opinions of more than 500 big names in literature ranging from writers and editors to actors and influencers on social media. Some book lovers credited the hoopla of the Times list to its incremental rollout and interactive media, while others chalked it up to the use of the word “best”—a powerful word that “automatically pits books against each other,” Hildreth told me.

Though the editors of the Times list made sure to clarify that “best” was not “an objective arbitration of merit,” their headline read a lot differently than other lists books that include the word “best,” such as Lit Hub’s “The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023” or even The Atlantic’s “Great American Novels” list from earlier this year. Flustered by the authoritative nature of the list, readers were shocked by the snubs as well as the dearth of African and Indigenous literature. Meanwhile, OCD-minded folks like myself were unsettled by the list’s lack of organization. “Okay, but where are the categories?” asked bookstagrammer Alicia McClintic. “It felt like a big brain dump,” she told me.

It has been said that literary curation “matters more than ever,” though the frenzy generated by the Times list suggests an outsized attachment to such a subjective, fallible, and at times performative exercise. Sensitive to the pressures of what Hildreth calls “reading in public,” book lovers on social media were quick to point out that there were no children’s books on the Times list, while genre behemoths like Diana Gabaldon and George R. R. Martin were nowhere to be found. In a corresponding podcast episode, the editors of the list acknowledged a performative bias toward “fancy books,” suggesting that we have all become enamored with the idea of cultivating a bookish identity—perhaps more than the act of reading itself.

Alongside apps like Goodreads, “best of” lists can light a fire on an OCD brain as they make reading into an unachievable numbers game—a quest for perfection that equates the type or number of books one reads with one’s credibility, or “purity,” as a bookworm. Humbling is the day I compare the number of books I have read with that of a fellow book lover (I usually fall short by a factor of 10) or calculate how long I’d have to live to read every “must-read” book (at least 150). Can you call yourself a book lover if you don’t read a lot of books or the “right” books? What if you’re a slow reader or really busy or have “unfancy” taste? Certainly, “counting how many things you consume is a really weird way to measure how much you enjoy a hobby,” says poet and vlogger Leena Norms.

Or is it? Every day, our phones invite us to track every aspect of our lives, from the number of hours we sleep and the number of steps we take to the number of consecutive days we spend on Headspace, Peloton, or Wordle. Wellness experts say that tracking can help us take stock of our progress while offering much-needed validation when undergoing a private struggle. When applied too liberally, however, such tracking can also fuel a toxic obsession with self-betterment that feeds off of maximal productivity, ultimate sophistication, and unceasing hustle. Over time, this constant tracking and list-making can turn life into what Anne Helen Petersen calls “one never-ending to-do list.” We push ourselves to be not just optimally efficient and eternally busy, but also “culturally omnivorous”—like ever-growing human encyclopedias.

Governed by OCD, my mind offers the perfect breeding ground for this kind of “information hoarding.” Walt Whitman tells us that we all “contain multitudes,” but we with OCD perhaps contain too many multitudes. Thanks to a few faulty neurotransmitters, our brains compel us to assign a name and a place for every thought, observation, dream, and fear, unable to tolerate anything that might become lost, unitemized, or “impure.”

Like many with OCD, I find it hard to articulate why I feel the need to do this, just as I can’t explain why I need to do things a certain number of times or incessantly wash my hands, sometimes until they bleed. Maybe it is an intensified form of “optimization” or a way to suspend the chaos of my mind. For the briefest of moments, a list can make me feel self-possessed and whole, as though I’m carrying a load of laundry without any stray socks, falling underwear, or dragging pants.

But then inevitably, the moment fades. Indeed, for as helpful and fun as lists can be, I am slowly learning to let them go.

Take it from someone who’s tried and failed: Life cannot be lived in lists, just as it cannot be endlessly tracked or graphed. There will always be an item that doesn’t get added or a task that doesn’t get done. Life gets a lot more fun when you finally realize you can’t have, know, do, (or read) it all.