The Harvard Five-Foot Shelf is a beautiful collection of literature designed to give any reader a thorough self-education. I’ve set out to read this collection several times but never got very far. But at the beginning of this year, I wanted to change that. The first volume of this collection is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Benjamin Franklin before picking up this book, apart from the basics of his inventions and ideas that I’ve taught to my students. After finishing Franklin’s autobiography, I think it was a very intentional choice by whoever…