More top ten list happiness, this time from Robert McCrum’s review J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten.

… [L]ists are shameful, vapid, and depressing, but they are also irresistible. Moreover, these blameless parlor games are perfectly suited to the global narcissism of the Internet.

Why so compulsive? Obviously, in the whirling blizzard of new prose and amid the disorienting static of mass communications, a list provides a signpost, a welcome simplification of confusing data and, perhaps, a still small voice of clarity. Next, especially for bookish blokes whose reading must be susceptible to notions of rank and consequence, a list posts a valuation on a vivid but meaningless literary Footsie. Finally, a list is simultaneously an aide-memoire, a reproach and a provocation.

In the age of the blog, the literary list is catnip to the schmoozing saboteurs of Starbucks. Four years ago, in a moment of exhilaration, The Observer came up with “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time.” As you read this, somewhere in Ulan Bator or Wagga Wagga someone is even now denouncing our selection. Occasionally, like an inexplicable intergalactic storm, the web will explode in an incandescent moment of literary rage.

List compulsion persists. Last year, both the New York Times and The Observer asked panels of writers to nominate “the best (American/English) novel of the last twenty-five years” (answer: [Toni Morrison's] Beloved and [J. M. Coetzee's] Disgrace). Both lists came with literary critical health warnings, disclaimers and small print. Both inspired hours of happy blogging, hundreds of column inches, and seemingly limitless internet chattering. Globally interconnected as we are, we still know nothing, really. The lost consensus of earlier times is something we can mourn but do nothing to redress. It’s the way we read now …