Opening paragraphs............................

Dear Son - So begins Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1788), and with it the Harvard Classics.  On that New Year's night, the words seemed to confirm my idea of the Classics as a communication from earlier generations, and I was excited to be finally receiving this communication.  Several times over the months since I'd come up with my plan to read the Shelf, I'd considered getting an early start.  I would walk to the place where the volumes waited in my parents' library and run my fingers along their spines, wondering what secrets they held for me.  The fifty-one volumes took up three shelves, each close to two feet wide - the whole thing a bit more than the advertised five feet, I guessed.  Reading a volume of four or five hundred pages a week didn't seem like much of a task, but when these books were taken together the expanse was overwhelming.
-Christopher R. Beha, The Whole Five Feet:  What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else