. . . Before You Die!
Books of lists are definitely one of my top ten favorite things to read.
Maybe I’m seeing them everywhere lately thanks to the holiday season, when a thoughtfully-chosen book of lists makes a solid gift for an impossibly picky movie-lover, music-aficionado, or world-traveler. There appear to be at least two warring publishing outfits working on the “1,000/1,001 . . . Before You Die” premise of list-making, and while their products seem to spawn more argument and debate than consensus, well, perhaps that’s the whole point of obsessive list-making in the first place.
The first one I ran into several months ago was the bracingly-titled 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz. With a true Okie sense of mild inferiority, I hesitatingly paged toward the “O” section of the chapter of places to see in the United States to check out how the Sooner State was represented. I found a single entry there for our entire state–Cattlemen’s Steakhouse–which proudly sits alongside the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Count Dracula’s Castle in Romania on Ms. Schultz’s comprehensive global checklist.
Not long afterwards I ran into Schultz’s more narrowly focused 1,000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die, a far more realistic prospect given my own meager travel budget and rudimentary command of only a single language. Oklahoma is slightly better represented in this volume, with seven entries for the pathologically ambitious traveler to check off his or her life list.
Schultz’s books are very handy either for a starting point for serious travel research or for idle browsing and daydreaming. She provides contact information and web addresses as well as helpful tips on the best times of year to visit, and her lists encompass some off-the-beaten-path entries as well as the obvious highlights. I especially appreciated her write-ups on Oklahoma City’s own Red Earth Festival and the awesome Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
The same publisher has also released music critic Tom Moon’s daunting 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, which hops from genre to genre in a straight alphabetical listing that is even more opinionated and arguable than Schultz’s travel volumes. Moon’s approach is thoughtful and impassioned, as he takes the “before you die” aspect of the list especially seriously. He notes in the introduction that he saw the title “as a mandate: Everything here had to have some incandescent life-changing energy inside it.” Thus readers will find The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin rubbing elbows with Ella Fitzgerald and Flatt & Scruggs, while each entry also features key tracks and suggestions for further listening deeper in the artist’s catalog.
The list-making ante is upped by one in editor Steven Jay Schneider’s “1001″ series, which includes 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (thanks a lot, pal) as well as volumes on classical recordings, popular music, and movies. Schneider’s entries are impressively international in scope, featuring many less-familiar recommendations among foreign films and music and lengthier essays on each entry than the 1,000…Before You Die versions.
The Schneider series goes on to demand you view thousands of paintings, taste thousands of foods, and ogle thousands of buildings before exhaustedly collapsing into the sweet caress of death by sensory exhaustion. For readers who enjoy a good list-driven argument or the fantasy of sampling 1001 wines, it’s easy to enjoy (and overlook the explicit threat in the titles of) these would-be authoritative compilations.
