The idea here is to think of *some portion* of your reading as a more formal education, and set out to treat it as such. Therefore, you construct a syllabus of things that you don't know much about, but should, and select books that meet those deficiencies. I recently ran across this idea from [a post by Rachel Sudeley](https://substack.com/notes/post/p-129959530), who in turn had run across [Ted Gioia's post](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-lifetime-reading-plan). Both are useful to read if this idea interests you. ## My implementation It interests me, so it's something I've begun to adopt. Perhaps "re-adopt" is a better way to describe it, as I happened across several reading lists I've constructed in the past to achieve a similar goal. My goal is less about recreating my own well-rounded, structured liberal education, however. There's some of that, certainly, but it's not the primary goal. Instead, my primary motivation here is to ensure that I read up on topics that will undoubtedly improve my life in the next five-or-so years. These are books or topics that, like reading a religious text, I'm not inherently inspired to do. I need a goal, a reason, some sort of personal commitment, to choose them over whatever topic interests me in the moment. I know it'll be good for me to do so, but I just need a bit of a kick and some structure to get started. I expect, like my [[Life Block Planning]], that this list will shift over time. So I'm implementing it as it's own "block" of sorts. That means starting with 20 books over a five year period, and shifting as things change. I'm still building the list, but I expect a heavy dose of books on the history of regions in the world that we expect to visit in the next few years (I feel woefully inadequate in this, after having spent so much time focused on US-based travel) and some foundational philosophical books that I've always felt like I should know better. ## Related - [[Open Antilibrary Book Club]] --- *Posted June 21, 2023*