The Fifty Best Books Written by Women? Read for Yourself How One List Just Led to Another and Another and Another……..

Lists seem to be the newest communications genre to bring attention to, well, anything. The Fifty Best Books Written by Women list arrived in my inbox from a very clever woman, Kate Rothwell. I don’t know Kate, but she clearly wanted everyone to read her blog. Why not? So she sent a quasi-personalized email to me (and probably hundreds if not thousands of other probably mostly female bloggers) suggesting that I read her post. Okay, so I fell for it. I read it.

After all, I am in a book club. I like to read. I wanted to see how many I had read. And I didn’t want to disappoint Kate. After all, I thought she was a sister blogger. But then as I searched deeper (and found out she wasn’t the Rothwell writer), I was slightly disappointed that she does it as her job managing content for the www.mastersdegree.net, which I am sure is a very helpful website.

But still, I thought, why waste a good lead? So I bring to you these 50 books. Actually, they are not all books. Some are plays, short stories, collections of poetry (okay maybe counts as a book) and essays. The “real” books (fiction and non-fiction) only account for the first 20—so I felt a bit cheated. This was quickly replaced by my self-satisfaction that I had read 80% of them! I skipped the rest of that list.

Right next to that list were 6 more lists, including the best blogs for medical students. I scanned that one and didn’t see Dana’s and my blog, Like Mother, Like Doctor . Now I was becoming a bit suspicious of just how accurate these “best lists” actually were. After all, if we are good enough for NPR’s Ira Flatow’s Science Friday’s Talking Science website, then we should be on that list. And we weren’t. Suspicions mounting.

The index finger of my right hand couldn’t stop scrolling down this site’s current blogs. List after list whizzed by. Fifty Fascinating Facts for Women’s History Month (oh no, I just remembered I have to write a guest blog post on said subject for Gloria Feldt’s). Twenty Best Anthropology talks on Ted Talks. I have heard about Ted Talks but haven’t yet had the time to investigate. Who is Ted anyway? Don’t have time to find out.

Every month more and more lists. I am getting hooked on these lists. I just got pulled into the archives. Oh, no. I will never get to do what I had wanted to do tonight. What’s that you wonder? Write a blog about the Financial News’s 4th annual Women in Finance Survey. Hot off the press. They just published the 10 things companies must do to ensure gender equality—see if there is anything we docs could learn from. Yes, another list, but a good one, I assure you. Definitely earth shattering news and insights.

Clearly I am unfocused. I am coming undone. (Loved book with similar title.)

And then I found the Fifty Best Blogs for Following Women’s Rights Issues posted on October 15, 2010. Don’t even ask. The Brodsky Blog was not in their top 50! I thought to myself, “I have made other top lists. What do they know, anyway?”

I was done. And so is this post.