With New Years comes onslaught of “top 10 films and books” in my inbox. They’re great tools for discovery; everyone has taste. I’ve added any number of missed new releases, forgotten classics, and burnished indie gems to my favorite list-making apps.

But I also increasingly hate lists.

Over the last year, I’ve seen “reading list introductions to fascism” that imply reading On Tyranny and quoting it at other Bluesky users is the beginning and end of civic participation; a forty-five book “radical LGBTQ+ history reading” recommendations list that included dozens of pieces the writer had not themself read, and that many readers are unable to access without a research library; an assemblage of “cozy queer escapist books to avoid politics” that feature worlds where being queer is “normative” and thus the ruling-class gay characters can participate in forced marriage during intergalactic war just like the heterosexuals, or colonialist and imperialist violence that de-persons aliens, orcs, and robots. What qualifies as “cozy,” apparently, is just the idea that you are on the other side of the violence, and that those receiving it are inhuman. The best was an AI-generated “political resistance reading list” that included Giovanni’s Room over all of James Baldwin’s cutting political nonfiction and somehow mysteriously managed to pick the least combative item in six different activists’ oeuvres. Gold star; you’ve defeated fascism.

There’s a clumsy sleight of hand, here. If one reads the right books, one is absolved of other responsibilities, it seems to say. Simply recommend the right revolutionary materials or assemble the appropriate mix of voices and perspectives in leisure time. No need to build connections to your neighbors, or research local candidates. No need to really even enjoy the books. Or to think about how they relate to each other. One needs merely to push one’s glasses up one’s nose and click “read.”

The act of reading or not-reading these books is less important. How you processed them — how they moved you, whether they changed how you moved through the world, what they inspired you to bring to the world — all falls behind the importance of indicating that one knows one ought to have read so-and-so.

Sure, many lists are value-neutral: Top 10 reads of 2025 doesn’t have much behind it. These may even build community in conversations about what experiences we shared, and which we missed, and which we lamented we simply will never have the fortitude to undertake.

But there’s a perfunctory sort of cynicism and lack of exploration to others.

Take the bingo reading challenges from BookRiot: Read one book by a d/Deaf author, one book in translation, one book by an author from the Global South, one book containing a they/them. Why just one? And why always a full-sized book — why not a zine, a pamphlet, a poetry reading, a speech? Many of these particular challenges assume a white, straight, U.S.-based reader with a diet of books by more of the same. If we are supposedly educating ourselves and broadening our horizons, why is the primary medium for that one that must defeat a gauntlet of challenges that filter potential perspectives based on “who has time to write a full-length book, anyway” and “what does a giant traditional publishing company think they can make money on”?

A perusal of the reading challenge additions also yields some creative solutions. One recurring annual Storygraph challenge, ostensibly built to broaden readers’ sense of world literature, collects books set in a country written by an inhabitant or a member of a diaspora. But some of the most popular “books others have added to this challenge” items are often fantasy novels published in the U.S. that use global folklore as worldbuilding flavor. In the challenge shortly after Russia declared war on Ukraine, Storygraph added a note that readers may wish to instead read a book by a Ukrainian author. I suspect those who engaged with Russian or Ukrainian authors grappling with the violence done to and by their countries got more out of the challenge than whoever perplexingly decided that Welsh author Alastair Reynolds’ postapocalyptic time travel novella checked that box.

Talking to friends, this sort of list-driven reading also tends to encourage a sense of obligation: you have to finish the book, and give it your full attention, no matter how dull and uninteresting (or just ill-suited to your mood) it may be.

There are no questions about what the reader might want or need. The reader mustn’t consider what’s important to them. How they want to learn. How they want to grow. Whether they don’t. The reader must simply complete the list.

Consume appropriately.

One of my favorite Tumblr blogs gets constant asks for reading lists on deeply personal topics like trauma recovery. Their recommendations are excellent. But they also often point out: How could their list — composed of books they sought, driven by their own curiosities and idiosyncrasies — be the right list for anyone else? It isn’t. It’s a personal map of their individual journey. You have to pick up the tools to draw your own.

how I try to read

Okay, yeah, so I’ve been complaining like a grinch about largely fun and popular tools, many of which are just useful public service features that are more or less harmless at their core. I even used a lot of these same challenges myself back in 2017, when I was trying to squish my brain back into reading form after four years of burnout-pace joyless academic reading. I’ve also been, uh, writing reading lists in this newsletter.

At the same time, they do represent an atrophy of research skills, a dwindling interpersonal engagement with our own leisure, and a profoundly Protestant sentiment that moral consumption — or the perception of it — equates to moral action in the world.

So what’s the antidote?

For myself, as a reader, I have a few guides:

1. What makes my brain buzz right now? What’s joyful? What’s fun? What can’t I stop thinking about?

2. What do I need to know more about? What’s happening in the world around me? Where am I underprepared and undereducated?

3. Who’s lying to me? Who’s lying to others? What information may be antidotes or defenses against manipulation?

4. What is sitting around on my bookshelf that I need to get out of my house if it sucks?

5. What do I want to share — talk about, take to a book club, grab lunch about?

6. What books are making my friends laugh?

7. What’s boring, unexciting, unchallenging, too challenging, just not the right vibe? Set it down. Come back to it — or don’t.

As a (very intermittent) book review newsletter, I’ll also write more about books and media in conversation with each other, rather than just lists of what I’ve read. At some point I’ll do a 2025 retrospective in this vein.

what I’m reading this year

This year, a few particular interests, both through fiction and nonfiction:

• histories and theories of eugenics, in the U.S. and globally

• psychology of negotiation, messaging, and propaganda

• documentation in the mainstream press and through archival, oral, and community tools

• community communication and group/shared storytelling and meaning-making

I will, you know, also probably read a lot of short scary queer books, as always. Intermittently, I may leave my house, and see where the world takes me on these themes.