Toby Creswell - 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time

Seriously, how bad could a book with a title and premise like this one be? In fact, it's really only medium-good - the writing is workmanlike and doesn't particularly capture the ineffable effect of great pop music, and the selections are by and large as one would expect (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Neil Young, etc) - but I was still perfectly happy to go through it cover to cover, reading the entries about songs I know (probably about half of them) and skimming or skipping the rest.