A PhD Qualifying-Exam Tracker
Dead Scholars Club
“the infinite seminar”
808 texts. 15 shelves. 540 A.D. to the present.One qualifying exam. No guarantees.
A note on this archive
There is a list. 808 texts, fifteen centuries, one PDF, one exam.
You are expected to have read all of it — not skimmed, read — well enough to be questioned on any of it by people who have spent their careers inside exactly these books.
Spreadsheets are fine. They are not, structurally, the kind of thing that makes you want to read Beowulf at midnight.
I built this because the work deserves somewhere that looks like it understands what it’s asking of you.
It’s a tracker. Also an archive. Also a record of one person trying to hold civilization’s literary output in their head long enough to answer for it in a room full of experts.
The books will change you. Most were written by people now dead who had no idea anyone would still be reading.
They were right to write anyway.
— E.
What lives here
Three rooms. One building.
The Library
808 texts across fifteen shelves — Medieval to contemporary, poetry to film theory, the canonical and its discontents.
Track what you've read. Mark what's next. Filter by shelf, by status, by whatever your brain needs today.
The Command
One page. One focus. No spiral.
What are you reading today. How long. What's the goal. A place to brain-dump without judgment, log your wins, and remember that finishing one book is still finishing one book.
The Commonplace
The quotes that made you stop.
Every passage you save lives here — with its source, its page, its tags, and whatever you wrote in the margin in your head when you read it.
808
texts
15
shelves
540 A.D.
earliest text
MMXXVI
year begun
The exam doesn’t wait.Neither should you.