The Last Book I Read

I like lists, and for some reason I always have. But I'm not an indiscriminate consumer of lists-- they need to display at least a modicum of intelligence and wit, and, if they are going to provide the meat of a book, they must offer something more than basic ordered items. Inventory, compiled by folks associated with The Onion satiric website is a good book of lists, with an focus on pop culture from mostly the past thirty years or so. The topics are generally obscure enough to make it difficult to argue with their rankings-- that is, as far as I can tell they usually exhaust the possibilities (and since there is no standard length for each list, no arbitrary cut-off that leaves something relevant off). I also get the sense that the orders really don't reflect rank, so there's little incentive to take issue with what deserves to be no. 1 on any given page. The entertainment value instead is linked to how cleverly the choices are described or explained, and the batting average is pretty high for the book as a whole (I skipped over maybe five lists from disinterest). This is the kind of book you can read while watching a baseball game or during commercials, and it promises to delight again in five or ten years when I notice it on the shelf and can not recall its details. At that point it will probably also have some nostalgia value as it reminds me of songs or movies that I haven't thought about in the interim (as happens with other books of lists I've invested in over the years). So overall, a decent entertaining time-killer, if not quite as funny as The Onion and its other off-shoots.