Textbooks of any sort wouldn't be covered in my estimation, but a theoretical book on science, like Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, which I bought and read back in 2000, would count. On the other hand, my old Calculus textbook wouldn't count, even if I did every exercise in the book.

Ultimately, though, I think the reason that I don't count books dealing with law is because the 50-book challenge was designed to get people to read for pleasure as well as to broaden their intellectual horizons. The 50-book challenge was a response to the growing specialisation of knowledge and falling numbers of readers. As a result, anything I read in connection with work would not count (though I did count Bleak House back in 2008 ). I extrapolate that to any reading of a professional nature, so a law student reading a case book or textbook, or a business student reading Warren Buffet's favourite, The Intelligent Investor, wouldn't count.

Of course, ultimately the 50-book challenge counts however the reader taking it decides it should. I agree that the Illuminatus trilogy is three books, not one, even though virtually everyone in the world owns them in all one book, because they were published separately. That's how I split the Cairo trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz into three books, even though my Everyman Library version is all in one very thick volume.

On your last point, Greek is truly fun to read in. The depth of nuances is something that I miss in most contemporary languages (other than Russian).