I gave each individual "best of 2009" list 550 points to distribute among the comics named on the list. For unranked lists, the 550 points get evenly distributed among all the books. Thus, if a critic named ten books but didn’t rank his or her choices, each book gets 55 points. If a critic named 20 books, each book gets 27.5 points. If the list is ranked, the points get distributed according to a formula that gives more points for higher rankings and less points for lower rankings. So, for a top 10 list, the #1 book gets 100 points, the #2 ranked gets 90, all the way down to 10 points for #10. For a top 20 list, the #1 book gets 52.4 points, the #2 gets 49.8 points, on down to 2.6 points for the #20 book. After distributing the points, I totaled up the number of points given to each book to produce this "meta-list" of the top 100 books of the year. I only counted lists that had five or more books; for ranked lists with more than 20 books, I only counted the top 20.
 

Nuts, right? Sandy mentions that a guy named Chad Nevett "devised the formula for distributing points," which I should definitely read, because I’m dying to know how he came up with 550 points as the base allotment. I’m sure there’s a good reason.

It’s comforting to know that there are obviously lots of other people (guys?) out there who also spent their childhoods obsessing over baseball stats, comic book collections, D&D charts, and the like. That’s the beauty of the Internet: it links us all together. On the other hand, it’s also a bit scary because it makes it that much easier to cross back over that line, to go back into the interior world of numbers, where the big scary, chaotic world seems manageable, understandable — able to be controlled.