How long would it take to read the greatest books of all time?

estimated 130 million books have been published throughout human history, of which about 30 million are available in the world’s largest (physical) library, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In contrast, the portion of the web visible to modern search engines had by 2015 grown to approximately 45 billion pages, with far more accessible pri

Here is an experiment to try when picking your next book to read. Instead of taking a friend’s recommendation or picking up a book by an author or in a genre you already know, try reading one entire week’s NYT list in succession. Do it with your book club or your English class. If you read with good attention, you’ll become a bit like our machines

books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said.

The local library offers all the world’s greatest books—with no waiting list. (If you’re unsure where to begin, pick up a guide like The New Lifetime Reading Plan.) Most enduring works can be downloaded for free. For a few dollars, you can own high-quality, digital recordings of the world’s greatest music performed by the finest symphony orchestras

Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work