Reading at length and in depth

I happened to read two blog posts today that talked about different approaches to reading over the space of a year. Keri Smith talks about the idea of reading just one book for an entire year. She cites the example of a guy who carried a copy of Finnegan's Wake around with him for a year, reading and rereading it until he understood it. Which makes me think the story is apocryphal: I mean, who can understand Finnegan's Wake at all? However, I do understand Keri's desire to get back to basics in this way, although I'm not ready to take up the challenge myself (too much to read, too little time).
The other blog that I discovered today is the Harvard Classics Project, in which Chris Marcil writes a daily post about the books on his grandfather's Harvard Classics reading list. His take on how the classics are relevant (or not) to the modern world is funny and inspires a desire to investigate a broader range of literature in bite-sized chunks.
So which will it be? In-depth study or wide-ranging browsing? Or a bit of both?