The AD Reading Plan is a long term project for reading through history by reading interlocking biographies. Here are the basic guidelines.
Historical fiction is allowable, although it probably should be the exception rather than the rule. Biography and autobiography will form the basis of this plan.
Begin within a generation or two of the Year 1. Browse the biography section at your local library or do your research online. Choose a life you think will fascinate and inform, someone who stood at the center of important events. This is the first "link" in the biography chain.
In the course of this "life," you will come across mention of numerous people and events which may help in choosing the next biography. These are intended to be "interlocking biographies," so the the second subject should not only be younger than the first, but his or her life should have intersected in some way with the life of the first. And, obviously, the second life should carry us further along the historical stream.
In the same way, the second "subject" will lead the reader into contact with the third, and so on. In a real sense, then, these lives intersect one another, and the next choice of the reader will be somewhat constrained by the events and the setting of of the previous. This is why one should choose the books carefully, and always be looking out for the next life as you read along. That next life will no doubt carry you into new lands, new conditions, and of course a whole new generation.
Thus, the plan may start in Rome (or ancient China, or the Middle East, wherever you choose), but the life of one's subject may in time carry you off to England or Spain or North Africa, and the next life to yet another locale. But you are not leaping through history (or geography) randomly; instead you are reading history, generation by generation, by reading lives.
After all, history unfolds life by life and place by place, and so to read history in this way, life by life, generation by generation, is in accord with the actual nature of time and change (aka "history").
This is a long term plan. It may take several years to complete, and at times it may be a challenge to find the next book. Other possibilities are to read through the history of a nation in the same manner, or, say, the history of a great city (like Rome, or London, or New York). In this latter case, one is constrained not only generationally by locationally, but in the end one achieves a deep sense of the history of that place.
I'm going to begin my reading plan with a kind of stage-setting book, going back to the time of Julius Caesar, who (you history buffs may recall) crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, bringing an end to the Roman Republic and setting in motion a chain of events that would establish a far-flung "empire" that stretched from England to North Africa and to the border of Persia in the East. So my first book will be, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland.
And where I go from there . . . only time will tell!
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