Getting Started

I'm a little nutty about books.  One way this has manifested is I seem to like books published between say 1900 and 1960.  On the plus side much of this range is quite affordable.  On the minus side, umm... there's an astonishing amount of it.

Several publishing houses marketed encyclopedic western canon classics sets of books in this timeframe, including Encyclopedia Britannica which published "Great Books of the Western World" in 54 or 60 volumes, plus a couple sets of 10 or so supplements. The set I have is the 54 volume edition.

Doubleday published the "Pocket University" in various editions starting somewhere near 1903, until at least 1934.  The set I have is the 13 volume 1934 edition.  Volume 13 in this set is the "Guide to Daily Reading" which includes the plan I'm proposing to blog about here.  This plan calls for about 10 pages of reading a day from my initial overview, usually a couple pages from each of two or three selections.

Project Gutenberg has an etext of "Pocket University" volume 23 of the 23 volume edition published in the mid 20s, I think it was 1924.  The reading list in that etext is quite a bit more demanding than the one I'm working on here.

I also have a 1909 edition of the "Harvard Classic Five Foot Shelf".  I found a 1950 copy of the "Harvard Classics Reading Course" in my local used book store, and I'll be reading that plan also.  It is billed as a "15 minutes a day" plan.  Each entry looks to be somewhere in the 10 page range.

Sounds like fun, right?

Comments are welcome, though moderated.