Campaign for the American Reader: Five of the best books shaped by lists

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.

Ratcliffe's latest book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books shaped by lists, including:

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

If Eliot’s Prufrock measured things in coffee-spoons, then record-shop owner Rob does his in Top 10s. For him, “conversation is simply enumeration”. Others “have opinions. I have lists”. This cult 90s novel traces Rob’s breakup and his realisation that some things escape the catalogue. High Fidelity may not be the most likable of that long tradition of tragicomic account-keepers (Pepys and Pooter, Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones), but, for better or worse, it captured, and shaped, an era of lad mags and listicles.