Over Thanksgiving I had a wildass idea: reading encyclopedias as a new hobby.
There was a certain volume of the 1985+ Britannica called the Outline of Knowledge or Propaedia (revamped 15th ed). Outlines of outlines of the entirety of human knowledge. And a more extensive one from 1974-1984 (14th ed). It is essentially a 10 category scientific worldview. Sort of a similar organizing principle to Dewey, Library of Congress, or Universal Decimal.
I've bought the physical copy of the 15 ed. Propaedia and a 15.00 a year app for EB on my phone. I figure it'll take about 5+ years to read at 2+ hours a night and by looking up each term or concept in Wikipedia first and if I can't find it, then hopefully, if still published, a more "knowledge in depth" article on EB. Since there isn't a digital Propaedia published and maintained by EB any more.
https://www.markklingman.com/docs/britannica_propaedia.pdf (500 pages, also available on Archive.org)
(this is so big it may crash your browser, but could be imported/exported by copying it to a free dynalist account).
The goal is basically to become more well-rounded. And bragging rights.
But I think I'd like to take notes on interesting things to remember too, which could add a lot of time. I could make some jots on a moleskine physical notebook and then OCR or manually transcribe and slot into place on the digital outline. Not going alphabetically, but rather slotting each concept into the overall category makes a lot
of sense for self-study in my own personal wiki.
Two other encyclopedias that are interesting to me are: The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas and The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
It's an INTJ thang! But how can I remember more of what I read? Does this part-whole study plan make the most sense for the sheer enormity of the information? How do you eat an elephant?
