10 Years of Great Books

If you actually succeed in doing it, it shows an admirable degree of personal discipline. But what if, instead, you were pick the 10 or 15% of the works that really speak to you and build a list of 3 or 4 top notch secondary research books around each primary source book? I think you would come away with a much deeper understanding and would find it much more satisfying. Brilliant people have thought about and extended these ideas for centuries and if you just read the original documents you miss out on all that. I can tell you that I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering without ever having read anything by James Clerk Maxwell. Similarly I doubt you will get much -- apart from observing the spirit of discovery -- from reading Harvey's (yes you spelled his name wrong) Exercises on the Generation of Animals.