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In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

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The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Abolish the Top Ten Books List

Rankings are a capitalist scheme. Just tell me about the text

IF YOU EVER HEAR an adult making small talk with a child, I’d wager the conversation revolves around favourites. What’s your favourite colour? What’s your favourite flower? Who’s your favourite Pokémon? When toddlers are acquiring language, we speak to them in our lowest unit of thought: favourites—i.e., ranking, scarcity. The market is the prime organizing force of our lives under capitalism, and its relational logic of good, better, best is our default. Cash rules everything around me.

We apply this language to a multiplicity of things it cannot adequately describe. For example, friendship: you are near guaranteed that when someone says “bestie,” they mean one of several close pals, rather than a single indomitable friend.

And we use it to describe art. Best Albums of the Decade. Our Greatest Living Authors. The only movie you need to see this year. Easily the best novel I’ve read in a long while. My Top 5. This application is rampant, from high to low culture, from academia to Goodreads, from venture capitalists to your neighbourhood communist. Unfortunately, it’s a parlance that requires us to malign everything else to praise one work. But when it comes to capturing both friends and art, ranked favourites don’t make much sense.

By design, a work of art—let’s focus on books—is unique, incomparable. That’s why we get upset when we hear AI companies are data-scraping memoirs or building replication machines. But we resort to........

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