A list of lists

January 29, 2013 2:06 PM

I love reading lists with exquisite explanations of the things on the list. For example Time's list of the 100 best novels of all time or top ten lists that have descriptions of why the included items are deserving of being on the list. Could I get some more lists with this kind of breakdown?
posted by holmesian to grab bag (8 answers total)

http://listverse.com/
The quality varies, and the content ranges from bugs to space to morbid things to wine, but its free and there is a ton of updating daily material.
posted by Jacen at 2:11 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]

Cracked.com.
posted by Melismata at 2:12 PM on January 29 [2 favorites]

Hundred Best Lists of All Time, on the blue.
posted by DoubleLune at 2:16 PM on January 29

Robert Christgau's style fits this, though his website is a relic and some lists require a lot of clicking through, while others, maddeningly, have no links at all. Here are his best albums of the '00s.
posted by purpleclover at 2:22 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]

Richie Unterberger - The 25 Most Interesting Overlooked 1960s Folk-Rock LPs
posted by Lorin at 3:07 PM on January 29 [2 favorites]

It's hit and miss lately but I'm going to second Cracked for the sheer variety of lists - everything from deadly animals to war heroes to sci-fi concept art.

Greil Marcus, one of the world's great rock journalists, used to do a weekly list for Salon, but I don't know if its archived.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:45 PM on January 29

This Recording's lists of the 100 Greatest Writers, 100 Greatest Science Fiction or Fantasy Novels, and 100 Greatest Novels are pretty well curated and explained. (And it's amusing to speculate why it is that Gene Wolfe, who tallies seven entries on the second list and makes it into the top 20 on the third, doesn't feature at all on the first.)

John Cowper Powys, an insanely well-read and unjustly forgotten Welsh writer, published his own list of the Hundred Best Books a little under a century ago. It reads somewhat strangely compared to modern lists: Powys starts with a couple of sentences lauding "the Psalms of David" at #1 and gradually becomes more effusive as he runs up to #100. And there are some books back there that would have been odd choices even in 1916. Perhaps Powys felt that Oliver Onion's The Story of Louie (#98) and Gilbert Cannan's Round the Corner (#96) were more in need of a champion than Homer and Milton.
posted by Iridic at 8:03 AM on January 30

I like Jorge Luis Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy
posted by rongorongo at 8:52 AM on January 30