I'm Jez — a British father of three and in my early fifties, and I work as an Account Manager in enterprise tech sales. I'm not an academic, not a professor. A few years ago I realised how many gaps there were in my own education, and I decided the fix wasn't another degree — it was building the curriculum myself, book by book, in an order designed to make each one easier because of the one before it. This site documents that, as it happens.
The 500 Books Challenge isn't really about reading 500 books. It's about building a self-directed liberal education over the next decade or more — a deliberate answer to one question: if I could design the education I wish I'd had, what would it look like?
Instead of collecting random books, this is a curriculum: a structured attempt to teach myself how the world works.
By the end of the challenge, I want to understand why civilizations rise and fall, how governments and economies work, how science explains reality, how technology is changing humanity, how great leaders think, how wars are won and lost, why people behave the way they do, what philosophers have argued for 2,500 years, the great religious and moral traditions, and the greatest stories ever written. Breadth and depth together — understood well enough to see how it all connects.
500 is deliberately almost impossible to finish quickly. This is a 10–20 year project, not a reading sprint. The goal is to slowly compound knowledge for the rest of my life — never trading depth for pace.
125 novels — not just "fiction," but the greatest stories humanity has produced, chosen for what they teach: love, ambition, justice, sacrifice, courage, tyranny, freedom, suffering, redemption, family, power.
375 non-fiction books across 15 categories of 25 each, every category split into five mini-themes of five books — a syllabus, not a pile. The 15 categories fall into five broader parts:
The two halves answer different questions. The novels are about understanding people through stories; the non-fiction is about understanding reality through ideas. Neither is the "serious" half — they run alongside each other.
The curriculum runs Level 0 to Level 10 — not a difficulty rating, but a build order. Level 0 lays the basic map of a subject; each later level adds complexity that only makes sense once the earlier foundation is in place. Level 10 books are hard only because, by then, the scaffolding to understand them already exists. Each category caps out at one or two of its hardest books, so the whole thing stays sustainable over 10–20 years rather than front-loading burnout.
This is the part that matters most. Not History, then Science, then Shakespeare, then AI, then Napoleon, then Buddhism, in no particular order — that's a library, not a curriculum. Every book should prepare the reader for the next, each one answering a question the last one raised, so the whole thing feels like climbing a staircase. See the full reading order.
Mechanically, it's built two ways at once. The 15 non-fiction categories are interleaved in a fixed round-robin, a few books from each per round, so no single subject dominates for months at a time. The 125 novels are then hand-placed inside that structure wherever they genuinely echo the non-fiction around them — not spaced out evenly for its own sake, but slotted in where they earn it. Two real examples from the curriculum: A Clockwork Orange sits where it does because it's a near 1:1 pairing with the free-will questions running through Modern Philosophy at that point; and A Gentleman in Moscow closes its round on confinement and resilience as the inverse of the polar isolation just covered in the Exploration books before it. Within a single category the logic is more direct: in Science, On the Origin of Species comes before The Selfish Gene because Dawkins is answering a question Darwin opened, not one he invented.
The list draws on respected sources — the Guardian's Best Novels, BBC lists, the Bokklubben World Library, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, TIME's All-Time 100 Novels, and Tom Butler-Bowdon's collections — but no single list is followed blindly. Each book is weighed against three criteria: historical significance, enduring influence, and practical value to the goals above. A book on multiple lists is a strong signal, not an automatic pass; a book on only one list can still earn its place on merit.
What makes this different. This isn't a "books to read before I die" list, a Goodreads challenge, or a race to 500. It's a deliberate curriculum designed to build a wiser, more informed, more capable mind over a lifetime. The books are the vehicle — the real goal is lifelong learning. That's why ABL — Always Be Learning sits at the center of the project.
The 500 Books curriculum is a small, curated list — pulled from a much bigger personal library built up over years across physical shelves, Kindle, and Audible. The curriculum is what gets read with intention; the library is everything else it's chosen from. Browse the whole thing on the library page.
The library skews heavily toward fast-paced fiction — thrillers, military and espionage series, long-running detective procedurals — which is exactly why the 500 Books curriculum exists as a separate, deliberate list rather than just "whatever's on the shelf."
54 of the 500 curriculum books confirmed so far are already on the shelf — each marked "you own this" on its own page. The rest will be acquired as the reading order reaches them, not bought in advance.
