Confession: as a publicist, my work throughout the year is meant to culminate in books I’ve had something to do with hitting the exponentially expanding universe of “best-of” and “top-ten” lists in December. But, frankly, by the time January rolls around I couldn’t care less if I ever saw another top-ten list. There’s just too damn many to pay attention to and they all end up having the same damn books on them. (I mean really, does everyone have to put Freedom on their list?) As a critical tool, their ubiquity seems to drain their power quite dramatically.

But my fogey old-man rant aside, I was refreshed to see the headline in Robert McCrum‘s column in the Guardian on Tuesday, which read “The best boring books.” Was this the sort of anti-top-ten list that I’ve been looking for? Immediately I was intrigued.

Turns out McCrum was doing something a bit more admirable than expressing a contrarian reflex. His column was commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Blitz in London, which did a number on the old center of publishing at Paternoster Row. He has been reading books recently from and about the period and makes an interesting observation about some of the readings habits from the time based on the preferences of Anthony Powell. “Powell,” McCrum writes, “used to settle into bed at night with books whose monumental dullness offered some relief from the noise, excitement and terror of the Blitz.”

He goes on:

There’s no Blitz today, of course,and it’s difficult to recapture or conjure up the kind of reading that might anaesthetise the anguish and pain of day-to-day existence in such circumstances, but I think I do recognise a class of slow reading that can be immensely comforting. Here’s my top 10 of favourite dull books (obviously, a highly subjective choice), with “dull” being almost a synonym for “classic”:

1. Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy

2. Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

3. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled

4. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano

5. Virginia Woolf: The Waves

6. James Joyce: Finnegans Wake

7. Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel

8. William Thackeray: Pendennis

9. Karl Marx: Capital

10. James Woodforde: The Diary of A Country Parson

There are copies of these on my shelves: I would not part with them for anything, even though, at the moment of writing, I can hardly imagine opening any one of these books with much anticipation, or excitement. Curiosity, yes. But that’s different.

Happy New Year.

Context aside, that’s just a list of some damn good books. And one I can get behind.