The Dewey Decimal Project

The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed ‘the’, ‘cat’, ‘rat’, ‘man’, and ‘you’. No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic reve­lations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘we don’t write in the first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write until you’re in the third grade.’ —To Kill a Mockingbird

I’ve decided to start a new reading project: I’m going to read my way through the Dewey Decimal system. The plan is to read one book from each decade of the catalog. This will end up being a bit less than 100 books courtesy of some gaps in the system. Other than the beginning and end of the system where I’ll read the first and last books on the shelf respectively, I’ll give myself leeway to pick whatever title in the range sounds interesting.