About

Hello, I’m Steffen Parratt — an avid reader and lifelong education advocate.

The idea for this website has been in the back of my mind for several years. A convergence of events in 2023 and 2024 finally pushed me to build it.

In December 2023, I came across an article in The Economist titled "How many books will you read before you die?" It examined American reading habits and estimated how long it would take an average person, reading thirty minutes a day, to read 1,000 acclaimed books (spoiler alert, approximately fifty years).

The article included several striking data points. First, nearly half of respondents had not read a single book (or audiobook) that year, and another quarter read fewer than five. In other words, about three-quarters of American adults barely read any books at all. This pattern appears consistently across surveys: adult reading and literacy rates are declining, with troubling implications for future generations.

Even among the minority who read regularly, the scale of human knowledge is overwhelming. A dedicated reader might complete fifty books a year, yet that still represents a vanishingly small fraction of the roughly 160 million books published since the widespread adoption of the printing press. New books are published every day.

From a reading perspective, life is short.

With limited time to read, what we read and why matters greatly. That realization led me to reflect on my own reading history. Over decades, I had read many worthwhile books, but my selection was largely unstructured and clustered around a couple dozen familiar subjects. I had read extensively in economics, politics, and history, for example, but almost nothing in areas such as genetics or quantum mechanics. Despite decades of reading, I did not systematically educate myself.

I had chosen books the way many people do: best-of-the-year lists, published book reviews, recommendations from friends, and algorithmic suggestions from online sellers. What I had not done was to think about reading as part of a broader educational plan. That omission limited my intellectual growth.

At the same time, broader concerns weighed on my mind. The state of our political discourse, the spread of disinformation, and declining civic understanding all seemed connected to a population that reads less and understands less. Reading high-quality books, and discussing them with others, struck me as one of the few realistic antidotes to these trends.

Then came the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence. Just as automation reshaped manufacturing and software transformed administrative work, AI now threatens white-collar professions. This raises an unsettling question: what advice should we give our children and grandchildren about preparing for an uncertain future?

My conclusion is simple but demanding. If we are to succeed — as individuals, families, communities, and a nation — we must cultivate a far deeper understanding of a world that is complex and rapidly changing. A high school diploma is not enough. A university degree is helpful, but not sufficient. Education cannot be a phase of life: it must be a lifelong practice.

What would that look like in practical terms?

Many people are asking this same question, and there is no single clear answer. This website represents one attempt. I used a combination of traditional sources and modern tools, including AI, to outline a broad liberal education curriculum and identify high-quality, accessible books for each subject. The goal is not prescription, but structure: a starting point that individuals can adapt to their own needs and interests.

Each learner begins with a shared foundation, then customizes it to meet their needs. Over time, the site reflects how people actually learn, allowing the curriculum to evolve alongside the community. In that sense, this is an experiment — not only in technology, but in how we might approach education in adulthood.

If you believe that learning should not end with formal schooling, and that your intellectual life deserves the same care and intention as other parts of your life, I invite you to explore the site and consider whether this experiment might be helpful to you.