We are entering that godforsaken time of year when every website on earth unleashes lists of the year's best and worst whatevers. For the most part, I'm allergic to year-end lists; there's no room for nuance, and they pretty much only exist because writers and editors get lazy around the holidays. There's no lasting value to any random year-end list.

But! I will make an exception for #libfaves13, the Twitter hashtag which features librarians counting down their favorite books for the year, day by day. Why is this list different? Well, for one, it's not written by some lazy-ass magazine writer in New York or a know-nothing movie reviewer with an agenda to push. Librarians are inherently better and more worthwhile people than journalists, which makes their lists more important. But more importantly, a whole bunch of librarians are taking part in the process, and the lists appear in chronological order on Twitter. This wipes out the childish good-bad linearity of most year-end lists and creates an effect more akin to walking into a library and having a bunch of librarians toss good books at you, minus the potential head trauma.

Dropping into the hashtag at any given point pretty much ensures that you'll hear about a good book that you've never heard about before. I recommend it.

(Via David Wright on Twitter.)