Sentence:  Besides showing no inclination , apparently , to absent himself from his native region even for short periods , and in addition writing a shelf of books set in the region , he has handled in those books an astonishingly complete <WSD>list</WSD> of matters which have been important in the South during the past hundred years . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  a database containing an ordered array of items (names or topics)