I love a review I read of the book. Yes, I should buy it and keep it next to my bed. I should just open it and read a random passage.
Yup. Start to finish. Took me several years, since it can be a bit heavy at times. I have an eight volume set, so would read a volume, then read something else for a while.
Twice, once as a young man in my twenties and once more twenty years later. It’s one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime.
We don’t HAVE to read it. We all know what it says, and can all sum it up in one line: Christianity destroyed the Roman Empire.
What, there’s something more to it? Next you’ll be telling me Santayana said something besides “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
But we don’t read it for what Gibbon says, we read it for how he says it.