Like it or not, pretty much everyone today lives in a world of lists. If the lists are not made for us, we compile them ourselves: places to go, things to do and to see. The Italian novelist Umberto Eco found this so interesting as to write a book about it (he also mischievously nominated the telephone directory as the book he would like to be cast away with, on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.)
Mischief and triviality have always been part of the cultural role of lists, but they are also serious and revealing in all sorts of ways. “[N]othing seems simpler than making a list, but in fact it’s much more complicated than it seems: you always leave something out, you’re tempted to write etc, but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc,” opined the Oulipian thinker Georges Perec, in a 1976 essay.
