The Decade Project
The World's Longest Crash Course
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This project started when I decided to become educated in the area of literature. I had dropped out of high school and gone straight to college where I placed out of the English requirement. I declared a major in philosophy upon entering, and I avoided taking any course that I didn’t have to take. I was interested only in getting through college and on to graduate school with the least amount of loitering possible.
Fast-forward about thirty-four years. As an associate professor of philosophy at a small, Catholic, liberal arts college, I needed to acquire the background in great literature that I had so hastily cut out of my formal education. Turning to a good friend and colleague whose judgment I trusted, I asked, “Can you give me a list of readings such that, if I read one work per week for ten years, I can call myself educated in literature?” To my surprise, he agreed to construct such a list, and thus began the Decade Project.
The method
There would be several problems with reading one book a week for ten years. First and foremost would be the time commitment. Secondly, since the whole purpose of this is to change myself, I would somehow need to retain a lot of what I read. Thirdly, I would have to persevere or the project will falter and die. Here were my solutions.
Time commitment. While it may be easy to read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in a week, War and Peace seems impossible. So I decided to revive the speed-reading skills I had developed in my twenties. As manager of a bookstore, I had thought it would help sales if I could talk knowledgeably about all the books on the bestsellers lists, so I learned how to read quickly. My top speed in those heady days was about 200-250 pages per hour, which allowed me to rip through a novel on my lunch break. However, in the intervening years, I lost that ability and never was again able to approach those ridiculous speeds. Nevertheless, with practice, I did raise my reading to about 100 pages per hour.
Retention. Retention at any speed is always a problem. I figured out that the only way to remember anything is to read it multiple times, reflect on it, discuss it with others, and commit my thoughts to writing. Thus began the blogging phase of the project. Speed reading gave me the luxury of reading a work several times during the week. So I would start on Sunday by reading it a couple of times. Then, during the rest of the week I would think about it, discuss it with friends, mull it over, look for critical appraisals or interpretations, and maybe even watch the movie version if such a thing existed. Finally, on Saturday, I could write up my thoughts. It turned out that these thoughts would help me recall the book later, even the parts that I didn’t write about.
Perseverance. I could easily see myself putting off the weekly writing chore if I was doing it only to satisfy an audience of one. So I began sharing my thoughts with others. As friends and colleagues heard about the project, they asked to be included in the mailing list. A simple email list turned into a regular letter and then into a parallel blog posting on my personal website. My readers looked forward to finding out what book I had read each week, and the mere existence of a public for these reflections kept me from slacking off.
Decennium Interruptum
The project went smoothly for about two years until I became department chair. It then became clear that I could not manage the time commitment for the department and for the reading. So I dropped back to only occasional reading. Soon, however, I became president of the Faculty Senate, which took even more time, so the Decade Project went on indefinite hold. My website got hacked, and I didn’t have the time to reconstruct it, although I saved all the reflections as text files.
Fast-forward another ten years. Retirement looms ahead, and it seems an ideal time to pick up the project where I left it. Technology has changed, and Substack makes it easy to do the sort of thing I had been doing back in 2008, only more securely. So welcome to the Decade Project resumed. It will take a while to set things up, so please be patient with the mess. I expect to post new reflections on Sunday or Monday of each week, and will possibly post older reflections in between the new ones.