I found one of my favorite reading lists in a little book called The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time. The list was “The 100 Best Books for an Education” and it was my introduction to Will Durant.
I was browsing in a Borders (Remember those?) looking at books for, and or about my then unborn son. This would have been in 2002. So there I am looking for books about children and on the endcap across the way is a book called The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time. Well if there was anything I should teach my son it should be in a book like that right? So I took a quick look and put it in the stack. The book itself is a collection of essays and I think it was a good introduction to Will’s writing, he does a great job of talking about history in a way that is relatable. And the list taught me two things:
• How a great headline can draw you in.
• The deep power of curation.
It taught me that a list of books can become an entire education if presented by the right teacher, someone who has a wide view of the subject and can let you know what to focus on to have a similar understanding without the lifetime of study. The is one of the reasons I think Tim Ferris is so effective. So over the next few years I began to pick up titles from the list and read them. But what I really started looking for was a copy of Will Durant’s masterwork, The Story of Civilization. And then a strange thing happened.
After my grandmother passed away we were going through the house to see what everyone wanted before they sold the house and anything left in it. There were a few things that I knew I wanted but as I looked around more a surprise was waiting for me. There on the bottom row of one of the many bookshelves was The Story of Civilization. I had been looking at a copy of the collection for years. Now it’s an 11 volume set of books with each one roughly 1000 pages long, so it would be hard to miss. Maybe I had never bothered to look before. Or I did not know what I was seeing. But when I was ready, the connection was made.
I am still getting through the list and the 11 volumes. I am easily sidetracked by all of the other things I want to read but I keep coming back to this. It draws me in. Or as Will put it so well in the preface to The Story of Civilization:
“Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.”
So what is it that lures you? Where are your connections? Maybe they have been sitting on a shelf somewhere in plain sight waiting for you to discover them.