Somehow or other (probably other) I recently stumbled into the strange terrain of someone—evidently a Kafka fan—who uses the pseudonym Josef K; he is one among the millions who have taken time out of their fulfilling lives to compile useful Listmania lists for Amazon.com visitors.

Josef K has left us a legacy of 17 lists, among them “Items to Hoarde for the Coming Apocalypse” (Honey Nut Cheerios, a machete, a compass, Trojans, and the complete first season of Gilligan’s Island on DVD) and “Give Me A Break: Movies I Haven’t Watched Yet” (described as “highly acclaimed movies from recent years that I just haven’t had the time or inclination to watch”). From his annotations we know that Mr. K has avoided Brokeback Mountain because “I’m not homophobic, but I’m just not ready for gay cowboys”; and that he has been disinclined to watch Superman Returns because “Guys in capes and tights are supposed to be role models?”

Mr. K has also compiled a pair of useful lists for readers:

• Books to Buy for People You Hate: among them Boswell’s Life of Johnson (“Somehow the eighteenth century’s greatest literary pundit found a groupie who admired him even more than he admired himself”) and Moby Dick (“One of the greatest books ever written, but many people are offended by all the gory whaling details”)

• Books to Avoid at All Costs: a list of 26 titles including Being And Nothingness (“I find Jean-Paul Sartre personally revolting”); Tropic of Cancer (“Smut masquerading as literature”) and Pride and Prejudice (“Maybe it’s a gender thing, but I just don’t get Jane Austen”)

And they say that print publications are the only ones doing serious reviewing…