This is an essay in praise of bibliographies. There are select bibliographies, annotated bibliographies, brief bibliographies, long bibliographies. There are even book length bibliographies on particular subjects. A good one of those can be a fast track approach to gaining an overview of the area covered.
A select bibliography shows an author's footprints and the various paths she has travelled in writing the book. It doesn't list everything she read or consulted, just the ones that are most useful. So much time is saved in research and further reading when a judicious selection of additional resources is the result of someone else doing the sifting and evaluating for usefulness.
Annotated bibliographies go further in selection and description. The author evaluates the contribution of an article or book and you quickly get a feel for whether it's a resource you need to follow up. When someone has read a book or article, and tells you what it does, and what it does not do, they guide you towards, or away from that particular resource. Of course you have to trust their judgement, but that's true in all scholarship – critical appropriation. A good annotated bibliography is like watching a prerecorded football match on fast forward, looking for the goals and cutting out ball retrievals and the thespian dramatics of on field divers!
Brief bibliographies are entirely utilitarian and modest in aim; to reduce the options and save time, but often at the cost of the reader's wider grasp. Providing the bibliography contains the key texts, the significant contributions, the authoritative voices, and a range of perspectives within all that, a brief book list does the job. If it's well done, the brief list becomes a further reading list, with the promise that, if you read these additional resources, you won't be wasting your time.
Long bibliographies can be less reliably worthwhile. It depends on whether the compiler has included all they ever read or saw reference to in writing the article, however tangential. There is a very good reason for insisting that the bibliography of an academic work should only contain works referenced in the main text. The number of items in a bibliography may bear no relation to how much the writer has engaged with and processed all the items on that long list; or whether it's there as a stage prop of suggested erudition.
One of the most useful items in any bibliography is the date of publication. I remember being so disappointed when I looked through the bibliography of a large biblical commentary, which the publisher described as definitive, and found the most recent book listed was ten years earlier than the date of publication. That doesn't mean relevance or value depend only on the most up to date and current work; but on key areas of discussion and contested fields of study, contemporary voices are essential to the integrity of the text. That said, no bibliography on Philippians should omit J B Lightfoot's volume from 1868, or Gordon Fee from 1995, separated as they are by 127 years.
As to whole book bibliographies, I have to confess I have read several of these all the way through, including volumes dedicated to publications about George Herbert, John Wesley, and The Sermon on the Mount. Warren Kissinger's History of the Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is a remarkable achievement completed long before computers and software took the tedium out of sorting data for a publisher.
First published in the early 1970's, it was updated and reprinted in 1991 when desktop computer publishing was in its infancy. I borrowed it from Glasgow University in 1977 on long term loan and filled a card index box with information that anchored my study of the Sermon on the Mount for years to come. It contains hundreds of books and articles, annotated descriptively, and with all the publishers' details for ease of reference in pre-computerised libraries remember the microfiche? We are spoilt for choice today; back then, a book like this was manna from heaven for the researcher.
One more thought. When I was writing theological courses for College each module descriptor would have recommended reading. It was always a valuable conversation asking students which they had found most helpful, accessible, worth their time. One student complained about a particular book being hard to read; the response from the teacher, "It's an honours course, isn't it?" So yes. Good to have feedback on the usefulness of recommended reading. Good too to remember that core fitness means pushing beyond what's comfortable. A good bibliography is worth any other half dozen pages of most books.
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