Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

Ratliff's title refers not to the range of his own book, which is slim not encyclopedic, but to the endless world of music our Spotify-era ears have available to them. Listening is indubitably different now, and Ratliff's guide, organized not around "country," "rock," and "soul" or the "60s," "70s" and "80s" but around categories like "repetition," "sadness," and "density," has a thrilling freshness to it. You'll want to listen along to the playlists he includes at the end of each chapter (conveniently, there's a Ben Ratliff playlist on Spotify), but part of the pleasure is Ratliff himself: he is an exact, imaginative, calmly mind-expanding listener, and, as a writer, a stylist to match the musicians he celebrates.