Begin with curiosity, not chronology.
The Harvard Classics can be intimidating before you have read a single page. Fifty volumes lined up on a shelf have a way of looking less like an invitation and more like an obligation. Add the name Harvard, the age of many of the works, and the reputation of the collection, and it is easy to imagine that there must be a correct way to begin.
There isn't.
The worst way to approach the Five-Foot Shelf may be to decide that you are going to start with Volume 1, page 1, and march dutifully through the collection until you reach the end. You certainly can do that. But unless you happen to have an unusual appetite for systematic reading, it risks turning one of the great collections of human thought into homework.
There is a better way.
Treat the Harvard Classics as a library that happens to fit on one shelf.
What Charles Eliot Was Trying to Do
The collection grew out of an idea associated with Charles W. Eliot, the longtime president of Harvard University. Eliot argued that a person could receive the substance of a liberal education through disciplined reading, even without attending a university.
The famous claim was that a working person, reading for about fifteen minutes a day, could gain a meaningful education from a carefully chosen shelf of books roughly five feet long.
The eventual collection was published beginning in 1909 under Eliot's direction. It reaches across centuries and subjects: philosophy, religion, political thought, science, drama, poetry, history, autobiography, essays and literature.
That breadth is the important part.
The Harvard Classics are not simply a list of old books somebody once decided were important. Taken together, they form a long conversation about questions human beings keep asking.
What makes a good life?
What does a citizen owe the state?
What does the state owe the citizen?
What is courage?
What can reason tell us?
Where does reason fail?
How should we respond to suffering?
What makes something beautiful?
How do we know whether something is true?
Those questions did not disappear when the books became old.
Don't Start Where You Think You Are Supposed to Start
Start where something interests you.
If Benjamin Franklin appeals to you, begin with his Autobiography. Franklin is remarkably approachable, and because he writes about his own ambitions, mistakes, habits and attempts at self-improvement, the distance between the eighteenth century and the present can disappear surprisingly quickly.
If you like adventure, try the voyages and travel narratives.
If politics interests you, spend some time with documents and essays concerning government, liberty and citizenship.
If you enjoy drama, go to Shakespeare.
If questions of faith attract you, there are religious works from several traditions waiting for you.
If science is your interest, read some of the works written when people were struggling toward ideas that we now encounter as established facts.
And if poetry normally sends you running in the opposite direction, don't begin with poetry.
You can come back to it.
There is no examination at the end.
Read Small Portions
One of the most useful things about Eliot's original idea is the modest amount of time it asks from the reader.
Fifteen minutes is not very long.
You can spend fifteen minutes scrolling through a phone without realizing that fifteen minutes have passed. A quarter hour with a book is different. It is long enough to encounter an argument, a scene, a character or an idea, but short enough that reading does not have to become the evening's principal activity.
That matters with older books.
Some of these works demand more concentration than a modern novel. The sentences may be longer. The vocabulary may be unfamiliar. Authors sometimes assume that their readers know historical or classical references that most of us no longer recognize immediately.
There is nothing wrong with reading three pages and stopping.
In fact, three pages that make you think are worth considerably more than thirty pages your eyes traveled across while your mind was elsewhere.
Keep a Commonplace Book
This may be the single habit that changes the experience most.
Keep a notebook nearby.
It does not need to become a formal reading journal, and you do not need to summarize everything you read. Simply record things worth keeping.
A sentence.
An argument.
A name you want to investigate.
A word you haven't seen before.
An idea you disagree with.
A connection to something happening today.
A question.
For centuries, readers kept what were called commonplace books: personal collections of quotations, observations, facts and ideas gathered from their reading and experience.
The practice works particularly well with the Harvard Classics because the collection constantly crosses boundaries. An idea encountered in philosophy may reappear weeks later in a political essay. A historical event may illuminate something in a poem. A scientific argument may remind you of a philosophical one.
Writing down a few lines gives those connections somewhere to accumulate.
After a year, the notebook may be more valuable to you than any list showing which volumes you completed.
You Are Allowed to Disagree With the Books
A classic is not a commandment.
Some readers approach famous old books with an odd kind of reverence. If a work has survived for hundreds or thousands of years, they assume they are supposed to agree with it—or at least pretend to understand why everyone else admires it.
That misses much of the pleasure.
Argue with the author.
When an argument seems wrong, ask why.
When a writer makes an assumption that seems foreign to the modern world, notice it.
When you encounter an idea about government, religion, class, race, sex, science or human nature that has not aged well, don't quietly step around it. The distance between the author's world and ours is part of what you are there to see.
The Harvard Classics were assembled at the beginning of the twentieth century. The collection inevitably reflects the intellectual world, judgments and limitations of its time.
That does not make the collection useless.
It makes context essential.
Reading old books allows us to encounter people who did not know the world would turn out as it did. They cannot revise their arguments after seeing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We get to hear them from where they actually stood.
That is enormously valuable, provided we remember that reading a work is not the same thing as endorsing it.
Use Modern Tools Without Apology
Eliot's readers did not have an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas and searchable historical archive sitting beside them.
You do.
Use them.
If a paragraph refers to a war you barely remember from school, look it up.
If you encounter an unfamiliar person, find out who that person was.
If the geography matters, look at a map.
If a word has changed meaning since the seventeenth century, find its older definition.
Context can turn an opaque page into an interesting one in five minutes.
The trick is not to let research consume the reading. You do not need to become an expert on ancient Athens before reading Plato. Learn enough to understand what is happening and continue.
Think of these little excursions as side roads rather than detours.
Sometimes the side road will be the most interesting part of the trip.
Skip Things
This may be heresy to the completion-minded reader, but it is worth saying plainly:
You do not have to finish everything.
Some works will grab you immediately. Others will not.
Give a difficult work a fair chance. Read enough to discover what it is trying to do. But if every reading session becomes an exercise in endurance, put a marker in the book and go somewhere else.
The volume will still be there.
You may return six months later after encountering another writer and suddenly discover that the book which seemed impenetrable now makes sense.
Reading is cumulative in that way.
Books prepare us for other books.
Follow Threads Across the Shelf
Eventually, something interesting begins to happen.
You stop thinking about fifty separate volumes.
Suppose you read Franklin and become interested in the idea of deliberately forming one's character. That might lead you toward writers who ask what virtue actually is.
A political document might send you toward a philosopher whose ideas helped shape it.
A scientific essay may lead you to wonder how people distinguish observation from assumption.
A tragedy may raise the same moral question you encountered in a philosophical essay—but instead of presenting the question as an argument, it places human beings inside it and lets you watch what happens.
Now you are no longer progressing through a collection.
You are following an idea.
That is when the Five-Foot Shelf becomes genuinely interesting.
Read the Books as Historical Objects
There are actually two histories available here.
The first is the history contained in the works themselves.
The second is the history of the collection.
Ask why these particular works were chosen in 1909.
What did an educated American of Eliot's generation believe a broadly educated person ought to know?
Which voices seemed indispensable?
Which voices are conspicuously absent?
Which works have remained central to our culture?
Which have faded?
That turns the Harvard Classics themselves into an artifact.
More than a century separates us from the people who first purchased these volumes. A reader in 1910 and a reader today can encounter exactly the same words and yet bring radically different experiences to them.
That difference is part of the education too.
Let One Book Lead to Another
The Harvard Classics do not need to be the boundary of your reading.
They are better used as a beginning.
If an author interests you, find more of that author's work.
If a historical period catches your attention, read a modern history of it.
If one of Eliot's selections seems strange, find out how later scholars have interpreted it.
If you notice that a perspective is absent from the collection, deliberately seek it elsewhere.
In that sense, success does not mean finishing all fifty volumes.
Success may be opening one volume and discovering five other books you now want to read.
A shelf intended to contain an education becomes much more valuable when it refuses to contain your curiosity.
There Is No Finish Line
It is tempting to turn a collection like this into a project:
Read the Harvard Classics.
Then make a checklist.
Volume 1. Done.
Volume 2. Done.
Volume 3.
But the objective is not to conquer five feet of books.
The objective is to become a person who reads.
A person who recognizes an old argument when it appears wearing modern clothes.
A person who can place an idea in some historical context.
A person who occasionally discovers that a writer dead for three hundred years has expressed something he has felt but never quite managed to put into words.
You may eventually read all fifty volumes.
You may not.
Either result is perfectly respectable.
If the shelf leads you into history, philosophy, literature, science, religion and ideas you would otherwise never have encountered, it has done its job.
Start Tonight
Choose one volume.
Not the first one.
The one that looks interesting.
Open it somewhere promising and give it fifteen minutes.
Keep a pencil or notebook nearby. If you find a sentence worth remembering, save it. If you encounter something you don't understand, look it up. If the author annoys you, write down why.
And if nothing in those fifteen minutes catches your attention, close the book.
Tomorrow, choose another one.
The Five-Foot Shelf is large enough that somewhere in those volumes there is almost certainly a conversation worth joining.
You do not need to begin at the beginning.
You only need to begin.
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