Ella Fitzgerald – "Sunshine of Your Love" (1969)

I’ve been waiting so long

To be where I’m going

One of the particular behaviors that experts say may be symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder – or “OCPD” – is list-making.

It just so happens that I am a list-maker par excellence.  For example, I started recording all the books I read shortly after I took my last law school exam in May 1977.   

Me too!

It took me 20 years to fill up my first notebook, which lists about 1200 books.

The second notebook covers the next 25 years, and it lists some 1500-odd books.  That means that I averaged reading about five books per month from 1977 until 2022:

I’ve slowed down since moving into my 16th-floor apartment in the 2 or 3 Lines World Headquarters Building not quite three years ago.  I managed only 21 books in 2023 and 24 books in 2024 – that’s about two a month instead of five.

I’m doing a little better so far this year – but that’s not the point.  The point is that I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read – plus the name of its author, and how many pages it had – for over 48 years!

Do you wonder why I’ve maintained that list?  Well, SO DO I!

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My ostensible reason for keeping a list of all the books I’ve read is that I don’t always remember whether I’ve already read a particular book I see at the public library.

That’s a real problem with certain authors.  For example, John Sandford’s Prey series consists of 34 books with very similar titles – Shadow Prey, Silent Prey, Sudden Prey, Secret Prey . . . you get the picture.  Having my list enabled me to avoid starting a Prey book that I’ve already read.  

But because my list is handwritten, finding a particular title required me to flip through my notebooks and scan the twenty or so books listed on each page – a time-consuming and not entirely reliable process when you’re as easily distracted as I am.  

That’s why I’m creating a searchable computer list of the books written by some of my favorite authors so I won’t waste so much time doing manual searches in the future.  

That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do, but there’s something more going on here.  

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In addition to my list of all the books I’ve read, I also have a list of every streaming TV series I’ve watched.  I recently expanded that list to include movies.

I also keep track of all my bike rides in a weekly appointment book.  I got in the habit of buying one of those books each year to keep track of my legal work for billing purposes, but now all I use them for is to note where I ride and how long each ride is.  (I’ve never added those distances to see how many miles I logged in a certain month or year – I just stick each book in a drawer at year end and order a new one.)

When I began to play competitive trivia a few years, I created a spreadsheet so I could keep track of my team’s weekly results – how many points we scored in each round, our final score, where we placed, and so on.

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List-making helps those with OCPD to satisfy their need for structure and control.  Such people may focus more on the process of list-making than the practical reasons for making the list.  

For example, rather than creating a simple shopping list that helps him remember what items he needs to buy, a list-maker with OCPD may spend excessive time working on an overly-elaborate list that fulfills his need to achieve perfection in every aspect of his life. 

(That’s a really good idea!)

I don’t think that’s what causes me to keep so many lists.  My theory is that my somewhat obsessive list-making is related to a deep-seated fear that I’m wasting my life – that I’m not going to do anything of significance before I die.  

My lists record some of my accomplishments – books read, movies watched, miles ridden on my bike, trivia victories.  

I know those accomplishments are of no great importance.  But at least they’re tangible, and quantifiable.  They’re better than nothing.

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Before we move on, here’s something I read on the website of a group of Los Angeles psychologists:

Did you know that autism and the love of lists often go hand in hand?  Many autistic people create lists of their favorite songs, shows they want to watch, or recipes they want to try, among many others.  This affinity for lists is common enough that many people wonder whether making lists is a sign of autism.

However, that website goes on to say that “there are many allistic (non-autistic) people obsessed with lists.”  

Based on my research to date, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder seems like a much better fit for my particular brand of weirdness than autism.  So I’m going to continue my trip down the OCPD rabbit hole, eschewing any further exploration of autism for the being.

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Speaking of weirdness, I’m currently watching the Apple TV series Severance – which is about as weird as TV gets.  Today’s featured recording accompanied the closing credits of the Severance episode I watched today.

In 1969, a German jazz label released an album featuring Ella Fitzgerald performing with Ernie Hecksher’s big band at the legendary Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco: 

The first track on that album is . . . “Hey Jude”?   

AllMusic’s review accurately described Ella’s performance of that song as “border[ing] on the embarrassing.”  But her take on Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” isn’t too bad.

Click here to listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “Sunshine of Your Love.”