Will I Ever Read All of the "Great Books"?

Forty-plus years ago, my parents bought the 54-volume "Great Books of the Western World" set (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), and these impressive volumes have been a fixture on my parents' various living room bookshelves over all these years. This set was edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and was based on their educational theory that all college students should read these classic books; the program was implemented at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. Over the years my late father and I and other family members read some of the volumes. It has always been understood that eventually the Great Books would pass to me (as the English major and biggest reader in the family). I love the idea of the books, I love how they look on the shelf, and I love taking volumes down and browsing through them. I love what it shows about my parents' priorities that they spent a considerable sum of their hard-earned money on this set (as well as the Classics Club set and many other wonderful books). My vague idea when I was younger was that "someday" I would read all 54 volumes. Now, older and more realistic, I realize that it is highly unlikely that I will ever have the time or - more crucial - the inclination, if I am honest with myself, to read Euclid, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Thomas Aquinas, Gibbon, etc. I am probably almost as unlikely to re-read some of the authors I read in college classes: Euripedes, Rabelais, Milton, Hegel, Goethe, etc. As I am mainly a novel reader, the volumes I am most likely to read, or re-read, are the novels by Swift, Fielding, and Tolstoy. However, even if I have to relinquish the grand vision of myself reading my way through those 54 volumes, I love the idea of them, with their solidity and their embodiment of hundreds of years of history, literature, science, and culture. Of course the fact that they are from the "Western World" means they are limited culturally, and nowadays - appropriately and fortunately - we are much more aware of global and multicultural knowledge and literature. But that doesn't mean we can't continue to treasure these glorious "Great Books."