The Power of a List

I love a list. I save a lot of lists of media to check out, like this Guardian list of the 50 best films of 2025. I watched the top four from this list right at the end of the year, and I had a sensational time. It's a good list. I simply love perusing a catalogue of considered recommendations, or getting a good sense of the top-rated things of a certain type on a certain topic.

This is what a list can look like ;-)

Enter the 1001 Things series. These are big, chunky books going over the essential 1001 examples of a given medium, as decided by the all-knowing expert assigned to each book.

The five 'big ones' are: 

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
• 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
• 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die
• 1001 TV Series You Must Watch Before You Die

There are some others lurking in the ether, but these are what I'd consider to be the main series volumes. They are interesting reference books, made more interesting because each edition is frozen in time. The 2011 edition of the Video Games one makes a lot of references to the iPhone and how games are all coming to the iPhone these days. It's great.

I came across a video by emilitsa.mp3 the other day, talking about her mission to explore the list of 1001 Books. She chooses three randomly, and she reads those suckers. Cool.

1001 is a daunting number, and especially for books, it would be a huge undertaking to read every one listed, but I think it's a really fun resource to pull a challenge from. Maybe you choose five of them, and you enter a tantalising world of eighteenth century classics that you can never fully escape from. Maybe you just read one crazy book. But list-perusal has that magic. It gets me into stuff I wouldn't necessarily get into otherwise. It allows me to focus on a particular idea or genre. 

Like, I decided I wanted to read about some revolutionary American history this year, and so my first book of the year was Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis, a book I found on a Goodreads list of ranked American history books. And it was amazing. I felt like I was there with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. I felt like I was the bullet that killed old Hammy. The writing style is sizzling and present. A glorious read.

But I don't tend to take a list so big as the ones contained in these beefy books so seriously. A small list you can run through quickly, cackling the whole way, but a big list like this is enjoyable in a different way. The fantasy of being able to read all 1001 books is nice, but I have to be realistic - that's not happening. So I like this person's approach of having a random number generator choose her next books to read, and I enjoy just flipping through the tome and bookmarking anything that interests me.

In 1001 Video Games, I bookmarked Loom, a spooky-looking MS DOS adventure game that has a musical gimmick. That thing looks crazy. Gotta add that to a new list.

Loom (1990).