making a good list is hard. what is your top ten movies all-time? what songs would you put on a mixtape for someone you secretly admire? the kinds of lists you can make are only limited within your imagination and social environment.

lists are hard to make because they are so limited and at the same time so personal, so revealing.

a good list is limited. by its nature, it has to be exclusive. here’s why: imagine you asking someone for a recommendation for a good restaurant in town, and you get ‘oh, any restaurant is good really’. (duh) but while it has to be limited, it also needs to show a range of choices – the range of choices needs to be consistent, yet diverse. in other words, it needs a logic, something that keeps the otherwise disparate elements together as, yes, a list. raymond williams might call this a ‘structure of feeling’:

We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.

at once interlocking and in tension. the bests lists are like that. consistent, yet diverse. familiar, yet new. a list makes sense to you when you recognize one or two items that you have read/listened/watched in the past, and introduces new items to you, with the promise that you might like them because you liked at least one or two items on the list.