The week between Christmas and New Year's found me moving books. Which, to be fair, is hardly unusual for me. This time, I was rearranging my library due to the new bookshelves I am building over the new flooring I just installed. So I moved my complete set of Harvard Classics. The Harvard Classics are a beautiful, leather-bound anthology of 50 volumes of world literature. My set (which I finally completed after scouring the Internet for two missing volumes) was published in 1959, the 51st printing of the series. This anthology was born from an oft-stated belief of Harvard president Charles William Eliot. He said that all the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. As it happens, I own a five-foot shelf housing the very collection that Dr. Eliot curated and published. And I have read hardly any of it. Books have always provided me with discovery. This latest book...