“In Rome, I had nearly five thousand volumes in my
library. By reading and re-reading them, I discovered that one hundred and
fifty books, carefully chosen, give you, if not a complete summation of human
knowledge, at least everything that is useful for a man to know. I devoted
three years of my life to reading and re-reading these hundred and fifty
volumes, so that when I was arrested I knew them more or less by heart. In
prison, with a slight effort of memory, I recalled the entirely. So I can
recite to you Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Strada, Jornades,
Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet; I mention only
the most important …”
- The Count of Monte Cristo, chapter XVI
I love when novels get meta!
And I immediately interpreted this as a challenge!
These words, spoken by a man imprisoned for a decade,
rung out to me. I have fantasized elsewhere in these electronic pages what I’d
do with a long life sentence, and I’ve often rhapsodized about reading, books
read, and bucket lists of works not yet conquered. So, naturally, I have to
think about all the writings I have consumed (around eleven hundred
cover-to-cover, by a rough count).
Now, this man, Abbe Faria,
has read 4.54 more books than I. Therefore, my distillation must be of a similarly proportioned magnitude. Challenge: Can I extract 33 books that would be,
“if not a complete summation of human knowledge, at least everything that is
useful for a man to know.” Or, rather, a complete summation of Hopper
knowledge, that devoted Hopperites of either sex would find useful.
Challenge accepted!
More later … if I do not
go insane in the process.
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