I recently downloaded the Harvard Classics reading guide from this forum, noticed some OCR errors (through no fault of Crich, the uploader) and started doing some tinkering. Editing that ebook file was such a rewarding experience. I went through the first lines of the poems index (I love classic poetry!) and became excited to read some old favourites. I went through the reading suggestions which put the works into historical, political, religious and thematic overviews. It really gave me some ideas for a way into this massive series short of reading them in order one by one. It made me really excited to try tackling this series as a reading project!
I have been doing some tinkering and through a forum search found the tip to download the LRF files instead of the mobi ones since they have a table of contents (the mobi ones do not). The mobi ones also seemed to have very large line breaks between the paragraphs and the LRF I converted to mobi in Calibre seems much better formatted. Now, I don't have to worry about getting the books elsewhere or spending tons of time tinkering with them. I can just read them and enjoy.
And then----just to check the formatting, I downloaded the first poetry collection (Volume 40 in the series) onto my Kindle to peek, and in the introduction it says that the bulk of the book will be, pretty much word for word absent Milton and Burns who appear elsewhere, the text of Palgrave's Golden Treasury! This was my number one most wished-for Kindle ebook. I downloaded the Gutenberg and Manybooks versions and just could not get them looking right, and there was not a version here. Well, apparently, there WAS a version here, it was just hidden inside the Harvard Classics!
I am so excited to read this collection. There looks to be a ton of interesting stuff in there and now that I have some ideas for ways to explore it from a variety of angles I hadn't thought of, I am even more excited. I also was speaking of it to my dad, who is looking for a new big reading project now that he's done with Trollope, and I think he is going to read them too.
Has anyone else read these books? Anybody finished the whole series? Any parts you especially liked or didn't like? It's so fascinating to me, the scope of this collection. It was conceived as a way that an uneducated person could buy a single shelf of books and get a whole education through them. I think it will expose me to some genres I don't normally explore (science, philosophy, classics) and it will be fun to see how far I get with them.
I also feel a little put off by modern books right now. The last few I have bought have been either mediocre/disappointing, or been riddled with editing and OCR errors. It feels like a good time to be reading the classics again
