Here’s a project for you. Why not devote the next five or so years to reading every title in the OUP Very Short Introduction series? There are 526 of them to date, with 50 new titles planned for every year and an apparently limitless list of subjects. No, you won’t be an expert, but you’ll come out with a basic knowledge of everything from Bacteria to Alexander the Great, Accounting to the Devil, Sleep to Fungi, the Druids to Medical Ethics, with lots of useful facts about Mountains, Metaphysics, the Mongols, Chaos, Cryptography, Hinduism, Autism, Puritanism, Fascism, Free Will, Drugs, Nutrition, Crime Fiction, Madness, Hieroglyphics, Teeth, Organised Crime and Water… the list goes on and on.
And the writers are no slouches, if names like Mary Beard, Hermione Lee and Terry Eagleton are anything to go by.
Stern discipline will be needed, though. No straying from the task into the wilder fields of Teeth or the Mongols. If you read 3 books a week year in year out, you’ll be up to date in about 5 years and then it will be easy to keep on top of 50 a year. And what a fabulous dinner-party guest you’ll be!
Who’s up for it?
http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/page/title-lists
Image: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/ocean-books/
Gert Loveday's Fun with Books 
Count me out. I’m too undisciplined.
Exactly why you should take it on as a self-improvement project.
The list is already too long.
I’ve two of that series on my shelves that I’m ashamed to say I haven’t looked at from the day I bought them to now. There’s somewhere to start . . .
I’m currently reading Karen Armstrong’s short introduction to myth which I got over a decade ago, part of another series similar to the OUP’s but more circumscribed in subject. As I’m currently making slow progress through my current TBR pile I may pass on your kind suggestion.
Of all people I thought you might be up for it, Chris.
Give me an extra five years between now and 2022 plus a significant cash injection to purchase said books and I would definitely reconsider!
But Gert, by the time you would be up to date you would be out of date.
Leslie
Not if you keep up the punishing schedule for 5 years. Then 50 a year will be a doddle.
Oops forgot there’d be another 250 by then. Read faster or add a couple of years.
Just think of the new stuff coming out….