One Jailbird's Distilled Summation

“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.