Greetings! Haven't been active enough on here. But I have been working in the background. And I'm happy to say that I've finished one of the first steps to make the Great Books as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Here's the culmination of my background work over the past few months: The Great Books Reading Schedule spreadsheet!!
This sheet automatically calculates your reading times and lays out the dates for when you should start and finish each work in order to complete the reading plan within the ten year time frame.
The defaults are set to reading at 200 Words Per Minutes (WPM) for 20 minutes a day. Adjust them as you need. To get your own copy click "File" then "Make a copy." Then input your personal WPM and how much time you wish to dedicate daily to reading (calculated in minutes).
You can get a rough estimate for your reading speed here. I highly recommend reducing your reading speed on the sheet by at least 50 WPM since you will be slowed down by the different writing styles and new ideas.
If 20 minutes a day seems like a large investment (as a single block of reading it can be a bit overwhelming), reduce it to 5 minutes 4 times per day. If you have a bit more free time than most, try for 5 minutes of reading per hour. Those minutes add up more than you think. Play around with a little bit of time spend reading per hour to see what works best for you.
REMEMBER: you may not always enjoy the reading. I felt mostly as if I suffered through Rabelais. But approach the reading with the idea that you will be able to look back on your day before you go to bed and feel a little pride at having dipped your toe into the vast history of Western though and culture.
I've included all the sources I've been able to find so far that are free and available online. I'm missing about six at the moment. But I hope to transcribe those and upload them myself within a year or so. The first missing source is four years into the reading plan; so I have time.
Feel free to leave comments on the spreadsheet. I know many improvements will need to be made once I get a bit better with the Google Sheets format. Example: right now the checkboxes are more-or-less just for aesthetics. Eventually I want a bit more functionality for "checking off" a work that you've completed.
That's about it. I hope you enjoy this and that it makes it a bit easier for more individuals to take that leap into checking out the Great Books for themselves.
