A few days ago, a friend issued me a challenge on Facebook: without thinking too hard about it, list ten books that have influenced you.

Once I made my list, I was supposed to challenge ten of my own friends to do the same thing. Thus, the “list of ten influential books” would disseminate itself across the Internet virally, growing by a factor of ten with each iteration, until, I suppose, a billion Facebook users had coughed up a list of the ten books they’d like to be known by.

Of course, all it takes is one grinch to break the chain.

I’m usually that grinch, but this particular book challenge came from a friend who’d already ponied up her list, which turned out to be quite interesting. I hadn’t read many of her favorite books. Thanks to an irritating Facebook challenge, she’d provided me with a useful map to her inner life. I felt I owed it to her to do the same.

So without thinking too hard about it, I listed ten books that had influenced me:

Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
Collected Stories, Franz Kafka
Collected Stories, John Cheever
Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
The Marsh Arabs, Wilfred Thesiger
Crictor, Tomi Ungerer

I threw in Crictor because it has always been one of my favorite picture books, and my friend happens to be a children’s book illustrator. Also because it occurred to me, once I’d made my list, that it was a little heavy.

And, in fact, her response was, “That’s some pretty heavy reading there, Olshan!”

To which I posted, “Heavy. That’s me, up and down.”

At that point, my inner grinch took over. I broke with the instructions and didn’t buttonhole ten friends for the challenge. The exchange of book titles had happened on a level I was comfortable with — a meeting of the minds of two friends — and that, I felt, was enough.

The proliferation of these challenges has grown hand in hand with the rise of the Internet, but long before we were all connected by the World Wide Web, numbered lists played a central role in our culture — starting, I suppose, with the best known top ten list of all time: the Ten Commandments.

I’ll leave it to Mel Brooks to explain why the ancient Hebrews were delivered ten, as opposed to say, fifteen, commandments. But the persistence of enumeration as a way of transmitting information does beg the question, “Why do we love lists?”

In excellent piece in the December 2, 2013 issue of the New Yorker magazine, the science writer Maria Konnikova explains their appeal this way:

The article-as-numbered-list has several features that make it inherently captivating: the headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a preëxisting category and classification system, like “talented animals”; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront.

So numbered lists stand out like bright advertisements in a torrent of content; they promise pre-digested content; they appeal to our need for order; and are self-contained — in other words, they’re the Happy Meals of information: pre-packaged, fun, even tasty, but not very nutritious.

I grew up with David Letterman’s “Top Ten” lists on late night television. I liked them. There was something comforting about their bottled cleverness, even if the gags were often groan-inducing. What I didn’t know was that this comedy institution began as a parody of top ten lists. Apparently, head writer Steve O’Donnell was fed up with the bogus top ten lists he saw in magazines like Cosmopolitan and People, and decided to skewer them on Late Night with Letterman.

No longer a parody, numbered lists have become the kudzu of the Internet. The idea is to give people “conversation starters” that will make them sound interesting and well informed. The ugly truth is that they work. Who wouldn’t click on “Eight life hacks that will save you thousands” or “Five techniques that will drive her wild”?

Americans love bullet points, executive summaries, the short form, the bottom line. Our watchwords are, “Make it snappy!” While it’s true that numbered lists can be helpful mnemonic devices, the consumption of them is pretty much the opposite of critical thinking.

Let’s put it this way: it’s one thing to be able to rattle off the Ten Commandments; applying them is a different kettle of fish.