If you like musical lists...

...then you'll love the book, 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. Tom Moon has chosen 1000 songs, albums, and box sets of what he considers essential listening. He covers a very wide range of musical cultures, from jazz and rock to every era of classical, from blues and folk to Broadway, and music from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Each entry is a little less than a page long, and it features Moon's comments, genre, date of release, and other recordings you might want to check out. Here's an example of what he has to say about Confusion/Gentleman, by Fela Kuti and the Afrika 70:

"Fela Kuti built one of the mightiest grooves ever to come out of Africa--which is saying something. The Nigerian singer, social commentator, keyboardist, and saxophonist called his sound 'Afro-Beat,' but it really was global music--deeply elastic funk spiced with African syncopation and R&B horns, and enlivened by storytelling soloists."

Makes you want to go straight to iTunes, doesn't it? Here's what he has to say about contemporary American composer Steve Reich's minimalist masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians:

"The rhythm that underpins Music for 18 Musicians approximates the nervous second hand of a ticking clock. It's played first by a constellation of mallet instruments, and once the relentlessly rigid ditditditdit pulse is established, it becomes the canvas on which the rest of the fifty-eight-minute experience unfolds. Its tightly wound rhythm evokes the relentless pace of modern urban life, and also suggests something of its inhabitants--people who might be victims of a dehumanizing mechanization, or those who valiantly struggle against it."

There are 998 more recordings to read about, and checklists that you can use to see how many you can listen to in your lifetime. This book is highly entertaining and thought-provoking. For example, should there be six albums by the Beatles and only three by John Coltrane? Would I be worse off if I never heard ABBA's Gold (in the book) or the otherworldly 12th century chant of Hildegard of Bingen (not in the book)? I'm sure that, like myself, you'll find both points of agreement and dissension with Moon's canon of works, but his choices are bound to introduce you to some amazing music that you'll wonder how you could have ever lived without.

Official 1,000 Recordings website