The Best of ’22

I have measured out my life with TV shows

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

The late great Edmond Caldwell — novelist, critic, scourge of James Wood — wrote twice on his blog (what they used to call a substack) about end of year ‘best of’ lists. The posts were titled List Lust, or, The Banalities, and The Best Dressed Books of 2008, to give you an idea of where he stood.

Pointing out such lists are marketing exercises — a way to cash-in on the Christmas gift rush — would these days garner you no more than a resounding “Yes and?” (if words so jaded could actually resound). Say you nevertheless want to avoid writing what are essentially low-key advertorials. One option is to rise to such Obamaesque heights that your best-of lists are more like magnanimous acts of king-making, that you’re able to hire an assistant who’ll colourfully set your lists in Adobe InDesign and post them for you on social media. (What does it say about your best-ofs that even after leaving office they read like they’ve been focus-grouped?) But then I had another idea, a better option to appease Caldwell’s splenetic spirit: releasing a best-of list after Christmas. Then I had a stupider idea. For what’s the opposite of seasonally refreshed hype, of being on-trend?