What waking up for a moment and putting on a DW audio book and going back to bed...

will not do for you:

Help you to wake up gently.

What waking up and immediately putting on a DW audio book and going back to bed *will* do for you:

Make you have the most extraordinary Doctor-filled dreams (when you should be up and working). In my case, the scenario was partly lifted from Christopher Priest's Inverted World, which (sort of) is about a world distorted by a gravity anomaly. Mixing that with the Doctor made for a very wild ride...

I'm wondering:

What's worse to get into, this, or this? Being the geek I am (and having been kind of starved for serious geekiness in my life, in recent years), the sheer MASSIVENESS of either kind of intrigues me... but attempting to tackle even one seems like an investment in life hours I'm not sure I'm ready to make.

Are there reliable "best of" lists? What do you do if you want to get conversant in the larger Whoniverse and the Star Wars EU without spending the next twenty years on it?