While I did plenty of other reading in 2018, the majority of my reading time and goals were dedicated to a few things. I wouldn’t call myself a voracious reader. I certainly try, but I often fall prey to doing things that don’t accumulate and crystallize--timesinks abound. I set a goal of reading about 15 pages of literature/hard reading a day, and I’m happy to say I MOSTLY hit it this year.
On top of everything else, I do a lot of random technical reading (algorithms, math, finance), political reading, market reading, random essays, and niche sub-genres. I also read a bunch of trashy (and a couple not so trashy) Chinese fantasy novels.
Before I get to the massive list below, I spent the first few months of the year reading:
- Books 3 and 4 of the ‘Book of the New Sun’ Tetrology
- The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition by Ralph Kimball
- How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard
In April, after a number of years of putting it off, I finally started reading the Great Books of the Western World.
From Wikipedia:
“ The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.”
This is a 35,000 page, 54~ volume project (I may skip Freud). To really understand it and the motivations behind it, I suggest reading the essay ‘The Great Conversation’, written by one of the people who led the project, Robert M. Hutchins (President and Chancellor of University of Chicago).
I’ve wanted for a while to tackle this--it’s a long project. Coincidentally, I realized after I’d already set it as a goal (maybe 5 years ago?) that my dad actually owns a full set. Alas, I do not yet own it, so I had to scrounge for some of these.
I followed a curriculum set by the head of Humanities at Faulkner University in his own reading. It doesn’t get all the way through, but it does cover a significant portion. It has weekly reading--about 100 pages a week, or 15 pages a day, which is my ‘consistent target’.
In 2018, I managed to finish up through Week 28 (Year 1) out of my 38 weeks since I started. This means I took about 35% longer than I should have, so finishing the entire curriculum (at ~5000 pages a year, 35000 pages over 7 years) would take me about 9.5 years instead. I’d like to get that 35% margin down to ~20% or so in the next 52 weeks, or read 43-45 weeks worth with only 7-9 ‘slack’ weeks.
With that said, below I’ve listed pretty much every essay and book (sometimes chapters from books are listed as essays) read under this project. I’ve bolded the ones that either branded themselves into my mind, easily slotted into my system of viewing the world, were incredibly revelatory, had amazing prose, or really just stood out for any reason. In one case I note a specific couple chapters (Augustine) worth calling out in a much larger volume. Typing them out took a lot of time. With that said, hopefully next year this list is...even longer? Maybe 150-160 entries. It was worthwhile. I’ve learned things, I’ve had my ideas expanded and some conceptions important to me (like friendship) enriched, and I feel like echoes of the Great Conversation are beginning to be heard in my head, and maybe someday they’ll also be heard in my voice.
Happy to supply (or re-discover) links to any of this content for anyone who wants, or to help you embark on the same journey I have.
Here’s to reading in 2019!
- The Great Conversation by Robert Hutchins
- The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by John Erskine
- How Should One Read a Book? by Virginia Woolf
- Of the Study of History by David Hume
- The Two Drovers by Sir Walter Scott
- The Three Hermits by Leo Tolstoy
- Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization by Lancelot Hogben
- Of Truth by Francis Bacon
- The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain
- The English Bill of Rights (1689)
- My First Play by Charles Lamb
- The March to the Sea by Xenophon
- The Sacred Beetle by Jean-Henri Fabre
- The Killers by Ernest Hemingway
- Letter to Horace Greeley by Abraham Lincoln
- The Making of Americans by Jean de Crevecouer
- Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen by William Hazlitt
- Michael Faraday by John Tyndall
- The Enchiridion by Epictetus
- The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe
- The Lantern-bearers by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Meno by Plato
- New Names for Old by Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
- The Land of Montezuma by William H. Prescott
- Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
- Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (France, 1789)
- Sketch of Abraham Lincoln by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Discovery of Radium by Eve Curie
- The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola by Cornelius Tacitus
- On Friendship by Cicero
- Mowgli's Brothers by Rudyard Kipling
- Learning the River by Mark Twain
- On Being the Right Size by J.B.S. Haldane
- Contentment by Plutarch
- Fingerprints by Tobias Dantzig
- Apology by Plato
- The Odyssey of Homer
- The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
- Of Death by Francis Bacon
- Beyond the Googol by Edward Kasner and James Newman
- The Eruption of Vesuvius by Pliny the Younger
- On Old Age by Cicero
- The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
- A Call to Patriots-December 23, 1776 by Thomas Paine
- Cosmic View by Kees Boeke
- To the Reader by Michel de Montaigne
- Montaigne; or, the Skeptic by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Crito by Plato
- Observations on Mental Education by Michael Faraday
- **The Empty Column by Tobias Dantzig***
- The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon
- The Art of Life by Walter Pater
- **The Declaration of Independence***
- Biographical Sketches by Thomas Jefferson
- Phaedo by Plato
- Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln
- The Articles of Confederation
- Of Friendship by Francis Bacon
- Circular Letter to the Governers of All the States on Disbanding the Army by George Washington
- Nature by John Stuart Mill
- Last Public Address of Abraham Lincoln
- The Death of Abraham Lincoln by Walt Whitman
- The Will to Believe by William James
- Of Idleness by Montaigne
- Of Love by Francis Bacon
- The Constitution of the United States
- The Federalist Papers (1-44)
- The Doctor in Spite of Himself by Moliere
- Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes
- The Open Boat by Stephen Crane
- On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth by William Hazlitt
- Of the Education of Children by Montaigne
- *The Confessions of St. Augustine (Chapters 10 and 11 are my primary recommendation)**
- The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller by Gustave Flaubert
- Theseus by Plutarch
- Of Anger by Francis Bacon
- What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy
- Romulus by Plutarch
- Romulus and Theseus Compared by Plutarch
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
- The Way to Write History by Lucian
- Of Adversity by Francis Bacon
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- The Hippocratic Oath
- Thoreau by Ralpha Waldo Emerson
- The Histories of Herodotus (Mostly the cultural bits, I cannot visualize geography)
- Dream Children, a Reverie by Charles Lamb
- The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
- Letter to Menoeceus by Epicurus
- Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant
- Immortality by Sir Thomas Browne
- The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
- Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The Battle with the Cannon by Victor Hugo
- The Ethics of Belief by William Clifford
- Of Discourse by Francis Bacon
- Symposium by Plato
- The Rocking-Horse Winner by D.H. Lawrence
- Lucretius by George Santayana
- Plato's Republic (in progress)
- Goethe's Faust by George Santayana
- The Sphinx by Francis Bacon