Monday, May 21, 2007

The Plan, As It Were

It's a 10-Book plan! How exciting. Here are the books, in my intended order of tackling them:

(1) Marriage and Morals (1929)
(2) Unpopular Essays (1950)
(3) Proposed Roads to Freedom (1919)
(4) The Conquest of Happiness (1930)
(5) A History of Western Philosophy (1945) [Update, July 19, 2009; A History of Western Philosophy has been determined to be immune to summary (or what I later termed "summentary") and is replaced by Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954).]
(6) Bolshevism and the West (with Scott Nearing) -- a transcript of a short debate. I think that the debate took place in 1924, but my copy of the book dates from much later, 1974.
(7) Education and the Good Life (1926)
(8) Portraits From Memory (1956)
(9) New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
(10) In Praise of Idleness (1935)

Four of the books I have read in the past, but I cagily am not revealing which four. Russell's work within the discipline of philosophy (or mathematics) does not much interest me, as the list suggests. I am a bit concerned about the sort of 'notes' that one could take on A History of Western Philosophy [and hence later dropped it from The Plan]. The list is not exactly arbitrary but it is subject to any manner of alteration, including abject abandonment. But here we go.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Inaugural Post

My half-baked plan is to devote some time to reading a few books by Bertrand Russell over the next few years -- OK, it isn't a hugely ambitious plan. This blog has been founded as a place to record some notes on that reading, should it come to pass.