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Title: The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else

Author: Christopher Beha

Format: Hardback

Beha’s debut inspired me in two different ways.  First, it explained to me what the Harvard Classics are and instilled an interest in reading them.  Second, it encouraged me to continue to write about what I’m reading and combine that with how the books relate to my personal life.  Books are great because they can touch each person differently.  A personal review of how a book touched you can be much more interesting than a bland third-person book report.

Beha writes about his experience of reading all fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics within one calendar year.  The Harvard Classics are a set of books chosen almost a hundred years ago by the then President of Harvard, Charles Eliot.   The books were meant to be an educational tool to the common man.  In those days illiteracy was much higher and the amount and availability of secondary schooling was much less.  Eliot hope that reading 15 minutes of these books per day could “give any man the essentials of a liberal education”.  The Classics are a selection from the ”great books” of non-fiction spanning thousands of years that fit onto one shelf, five feet wide.  Just reading through the titles alone, one understand the power of such a shelf.

Chris always impressed me with his way with words and interest in literature.  Going to college with him, I viewed him and others amongst our group of friends as a beacon of inspiration for reading within my own life.  After declaring Computer Science as my major early on, I focused on engineering and less on artistic side of life.  Fortunately, through these guys I saw the character built through an education of language, history, art, music, and other liberal studies.  He was among those who inspired to me to pick up “reading for fun” again as I entered my last year of college.  Since then, I have made it a focus to enjoy a certain number of books per year to nurture that liberal arts side of me.

The Whole Five Feet describes a rough year for Chris, although he has had several.  Interestingly enough, it begins with a sickness and death, and ends with a wedding.  This is a classic literature comedy and also very similar the way my year has gone in 2009.  I could not have read this at a more fitting time.  Beha struggles through a bit of health issues as well, which really helped me relate to him as I recall his initial health issues in college.  While I probably could have been a much better friend to him through those troubling times during school, it gives me comfort to now understand in more detail what he went through and how he has since gotten on.

The books within the Classics that Beha relates to provide some inspiration of where to start should I make an attempt at the shelf (maybe in another 5 years…or maybe I’ll do the fiction shelf first).  His enjoyment of books such as Two Years before the Mast sound extremely enticing to me.  However, I am not sure I would share his same boredom with a work such as the Origin of Species.  Either way, whether he liked them or not, it only provided more inspiration for me to read them all.

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