If you find yourself both elated and sobered by that thought, I have a reading suggestion for you: a book that seeks to tame the Western canon and make the goal of being well read a bit more attainable for the harried twenty-first century reader.

In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer holds out a helping hand to the individual seeking a road map for the land of books, a guide for getting the most out of one’s (depressingly) finite reading time. Broad reading has long been the engine of classical education, and the author suggests that whatever your own educational background, it can work for you, too.

Bauer begins with the basics, offering suggestions for beefing up one’s reading speed and comprehension. She also gives ideas on how to make time for reading in a busy life – even one that includes young children. Equally useful is her three-part classical scheme for delving into literature: read for facts, then evaluate the logic of the piece, and finally, form your own opinions and respond through journal-writing or conversation with a friend or book club.

The second half of the book covers different areas of literature: novels, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry. Each section comes complete with a representative list of works to guide you as you read. Bauer introduces each section with an essay on the history of the particular literary form, giving the reader an understanding of how it has developed over time. For example, she explains how autobiography began with Augustine’s Confessions and has since manifested in slave narratives and political memoirs, with present-day authors continuing to be influenced by the form’s originator and his search for unifying meaning.

It’s this holistic vision – presenting the continuity and innovation in literature from one age to the next – that makes The Well-Educated Mind so appealing. It encourages us to pursue life-long learning through great books – and to fuse the books we read into a comprehensive whole, an intricate map of the world. With this approach to reading, undiscovered countries soon become familiar haunts, and – book by book – the world around us grows richer. Lucky for us, there are more books every day.