An Idea

Maybe I have been living in a bubble, but I recently ran across the story of Julie Powell who sat out to cook every recipe in Julia Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a year from the confines of her NYC apartment...And of course she blogged about it as she progressed. In the end she published her blog as a book (and gained a ton of weight).

I think that I'm going to try something similar, that will hopefully be less detrimental to my waistline. Over the course of the next year I'm going to read the entire set of the Harvard Classics (apologies for the pop ups) from cover to cover and write about them.

What are the Harvard Classics?

Charles Elliot was the President of Harvard College in the late 19th and early 20th century. The story goes that he publicly declared that "a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion." Later the publisher P. F. Collier & Son challenged him to create this listing and the 50 volume Harvard Classics were born. They were the followed with a Shelf of Fiction that added another 20 Volumes.

Why would anyone want to do this?

After high school I pursued an undergraduate degree in engineering and then followed it up with a masters degree in information systems and a career in IT. I used to read voraciously but it has been a long time since I have tackled anything more challenging than an article in Field and Stream. Hopefully reading these selections and writing about them will help me recapture something that I once enjoyed and add the "liberal education" that I ignored in school.