How long will this take?

There are 1000 entries in the Dewey Decimal system, from 001 Knowledge to 999 Extraterrestrial worlds (side note: my local library has a ton of UFO books in 001. So their collection starts and ends with extraterrestrials). About 90 of these categories are unused entries.

Some categories are entirely foreign language. Being monolingual, I'll have to skip those.

There's also a number of sections that are largely reference works, such as 453 -- Italian dictionaries, or 031 -- Encyclopedias in American English. Unless I find something readable in that section, I'll have to skip those as well.

My guess is that will be about 800 books total. I'm a fairly fast reader, but that's still daunting. 2 books a week, 50 weeks per year (2 weeks off for vacation) comes out to 8 years of work.

As I said before, I'm not in a huge hurry. I read lots of non-fiction anyway; this is just channeling and guiding it. I'm not planning on dropping all my other activities so I can crank out this challenge in record time.

Rules

Here are the ground rules:

1. I will read one book from each Dewey Decimal classification, from 000 to 999, skipping any of the classes that are empty or unused. Also, if I run across a category that is impossible to read, such as "Dictionaries of Spanish Train Parts", I'm probably going to skip that too.
2. Nothing I have read before counts towards finishing. That is, only books that I read after starting this blog will be counted.
   
3. I'll try to write a short review of each book I finish, and publish it here.
4. No, I'm not doing them in order. That would be sheer madness.
5. If I read a book that's not from my library, then I'll determine the most accurate number for it by looking it up in several online library catalogs, and use that.
6. I'm not in any hurry, and I have no expected end date. "Before I die" would be nice, as I really don't want to haunt my local library for centuries finishing up.
   

Questions, comments, want to sell me iPods? Post a comment.

What is this about?

It's pretty simple, really. I read. A lot. Since I'm not independently wealthy, and am, in fact, pretty cheap, I use the library all the time. I was staring at my stack of library books, thinking about what to read next, and I idly noticed the numbers at the base of the spine. Those are, for the uninitiated, the book's Dewey Decimal number, which tells the library where to shelve it. I had books from all over the library, and I thought, "I wonder how long it would take to read all of them?"

Since I'm not immortal, nor am I the guy from the Twilight Zone episode, I did have to scale it down somewhat. My goal is to read one book from every major number in the Dewey Decimal System. There are 1000 subcategories, although a number are not in use.

Why? Um. Yeah. I don't really have a good reason. Some people play golf. I read. Some slightly better reasons:

1. somebody already beat me to reading the encyclopedia.
2. I read a lot of non-fiction anyway, so why not try to keep a list, and try to make sure I cover everything?
   
3. I'm kinda curious what esoteric knowledge lingers in the dark corners of the library.
   
4. because I'd like to draw some attention to just how much amazing knowledge is piled up in even your tiny local library. They have everything mankind has produced in its 6,000 years. With all that knowledge, we've accomplished some pretty amazing things. You wouldn't be on the internet wasting your time reading this blog if it wasn't for some dude in Persia discovering algebra.
   
5. because I'm a big know it all, and if I finish this I can move up to a huge one.