Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.