Here come the year-end lists

I mentioned last week that I dislike lists. I'm also not crazy about The Onion – the joke gets old after a while – but it's not something I dislike actively. I just don't seek it out or read it much. Once in a while, though, something from the Onion AV Club will cross my radar and this time it actually spoke to me. In a column almost exactly a year old, Noel Murray writes about the upcoming onslaught of year-end lists and provides his own list of why lists suck so much. It's a good read.

Not only has the number of magazines and websites devoted to entertainment expanded exponentially, but those magazines and websites now put out a new list issue nearly every quarter, which means hardly a week goes by that Entertainment Weekly isn’t promising to reveal “The 50 Best Sports Movies On DVD,” or Q isn’t touting “The 1001 Greatest Songs Of All Time.” The overkill has robbed the listing process of a lot of its novelty, which may explain why readers yawn or grumble when we reveal our lists.

[via avclub.com]