Cheryl Drury

And still that escape and an ability to maybe learn something about somewhere else.

But I didn't have a background in great books.

And there were a couple of times that I tried and it didn't...

I always felt like I wasn't quite getting it.

In particular, I read The Divine Comedy and loved it before we went on a trip to Italy.

And I really loved it, but I had this feeling that I was missing something when I came to it because I didn't know all of these backstories that are in it.

And it just kind of sat there.

And then I had also read A Gentleman in Moscow, and it sent me down.

I was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and really, really enjoyed them, but that little Russian unit stopped.

And I really didn't quite know how to satisfy that itch of learning great books until I came across a reading list by a man named Ted Joa.

And I had been reading his work for a while, and he offered a year-long...

Immersive Humanities course that started in Plato.

And I thought, you know what?

This is my chance to maybe get a hold of all of these things and try to get a framework for a big picture.

And so I started reading it.

And that's been my reading life for the last 52 weeks, actually.

Yes, I felt like this is exactly how I felt, even with The Divine Comedy.

When I was reading The Russians and anything that was supposedly a great book, I felt like I was coming into a movie about a half hour late.

And, you know, I could understand like where the plot started from where I got there, but I felt like I was missing something.

And when I came across Ted's list, it was like I'd found the rewind button.