Library of Congress

I do a lot of reading. Unfortunately, the reading is typically on the internet...usually on http://www.espn.com/, http://www.nascar.com/, http://www.yahoo.com/, or http://www.bloomberg.com/. I am very interested in sports, politics and finance. A couple of weeks ago I spent hours pouring over articles in The Economist about Global Warming and its affect on weather and oil trade. I do not spend too much time reading books. I love to read Jim Collins books. I thought Good to Great was great, I loved How the Mighty Fall...I got Great by Choice a few months ago, but find myself only 35% done with the book!

So, I stumbled across a list by the Library of Congress. The list of influential, important books in American history. The list has 88 books on it, spanning approximately 29,700 pages. So I have been kicking around the idea of reading my way through the list. So, I went on another site to determine how fast I read. The site told me that I read approximately 45 pages an hour. At that pace the list is going to take a shade over 659 hours to complete. Now if I read two hours a day it will take me 330 days to read through the list! I am pretty sure that if I set a goal of reading two hours a day for the next year, I am fairly certain that I am setting myself up to fail.

Not to mention that some of the books I have no idea if I can even find...ummm, or if I have the intellect to get through. Here is a sample of some of the books on the list:

1. Experiments and Observations of Electricity by Benjamin Franklin (1751 - 540 pages)
2. The Federalist (1758 - 565 pages)
3. A Curious Hieroglyphick (1788 - 144 pages)

Some of the books I should have read in high school:

1. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850 - 192 pages)
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851 - 458 pages)
3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884 - 224 pages)
4. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903 - 179 pages)

Some of the books I really do not want to read (these books account for approximately 10% of the pages):

1. Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer (1931 - 448 pages)
2. Alcoholics Anonymous (1939 - 576 pages)
3. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock (1946 - 1,152 pages)
4. Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1971 - 944 pages)

And then some books that I am VERY interested in reading:

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854 - 224 pages)
2. How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890 - 206 pages)
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929 - 326 pages)
4. On the Road by John Kerouac (1957 - 320 pages)

I mean, I don't know anything about electricity, nor do I think I can read a book written in 1751 about electricity in 12 hours. I'm pretty sure that Benjamin Franklin wrote at a higher level than 3rd grade reading, which is where most stuff on the internet is written. Therefore, the task seems a little daunting. I was also thinking about blogging the whole process! I'll let you know!!!