I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It would be too hard to list the list of lists that Umberto Eco lists in his book called The Infinity of Lists. Eco’s book tells us that we humans are creatures that incessantly try to give form to the infinite universe that surrounds us, and we do this by making lists. That is why we make infinite types of them, we make visual lists, geographical lists, travel lists, lists of collections, to-do lists, and many others.

‘We like lists because we are afraid to die’ he writes, but what does Eco mean exactly by saying this?

There is an innate desire in us for control and order in the face of life’s overwhelming complexity and uncertainty. Lists offer us a way to impose structure on the chaos of existence, providing a sense of control. By breaking down life into manageable pieces, lists give us a feeling of progress, helping to stave off the existential anxiety of life’s unpredictability and mortality.

Eco implicitly advises us to pay attention to how well we create our life lists. It is after all a tool. It is like a chisel in the hands of a sculptor. A block of marble can take an infinite amount of shapes, it can become an angel or a simple floor slab. Its potential depends on the clarity of your vision and how masterfully you can use the chisel you have in hand.

The list you see below is aimed to organise my past. To see which books provoked me into thinking so much that I had an urge to write about them. It is not just ‘books that I enjoyed and I hope you will enjoy reading too’. These books were thought-provoking enough that they made me sit down and write in an attempt to organise my thoughts and form connections.

‘The list is the origin of culture.’ - said Eco in his interview to Der Spiegel - ‘It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums, and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.’