I recommend it. The organization is really nice; the years get more “difficult” as you go on and within each year the works are ordered chronologically. In this way it’s very approachable.
It’s not long before you start seeing references between the books, something referred to as The Great Conversation. I find that really exciting; it’s makes the stories richer in the same way as when you get steeped in the lore of some fantasy world… but it’s with ideas that shaped _our_ world.
Last thing I’ll say is that the ideas in the books aren’t a unified block. There is often disagreement between ideas, and sometimes explicitly called out. For example, Montaigne says he thinks Plato gives too much license to children to determine the topics they should study. Montaigne thinks instead it should be more prescribed. It’s moments like that, when you see two sharp minds disagreeing on such a topic that you ask yourself what _you_ believe. Then you can geek out on how that question was answered by Dewey and others that shaped what modern education is today.
Really a delight to go through.
I imagine some improvements in our understanding have been made since Gibbon’s time, and I’d def seek those out before walking around claiming I “know” what happened back then, but as an entry point is was a great, if a little bit too wordy, read.
With 20 books per year, this list implies that spending only ~2.5 weeks on each book would be both possible and fruitful. I doubt that very much.