Me, without any external influence on figuring out what to read next: "I haven't read any Hegel in a very long while. Let's tackle this one from my unread non-fiction section." 

Non-philosophy readers: "Sometimes, you read the weirdest shit. I don't understand how even your eclectic tastes are interested in THAT."

Other philosophy readers: "O dear G-d woman, WHY?!?! It's not for an assigned reading, you're not even in college or academia. So WHY would you do that to yourself?"

Me: "Because I haven't read THIS one before. And I like to read things in entirety to form my own opinions on it...." 

Also me, halfway through a pot of coffee and falling asleep as I reread for the fifth time a lengthy sentence that's most of a paragraph that's 1.5pgs long and can be summed up "artistic preferences are inherently subjective" : "O mes bons dieux... Why am I doing this to myself? I hate my completionist streak right now. And I hate Hegel. He needs a fucking editor..." 

And maybe it's a matter of translation (spoiler alert: German is not one of the languages I have any fluency in reading) but gods damnit the man takes so many fucking words to say so fucking little..... And I'M saying that! Here! Where I regularly stream of consciousness word vomit to try to get a view on the shapes of my feelings/thoughts crystallized into frozen word forms.

At least The Philosophy of Art is extremely short because it's Hegel attempting to summarize his theories expounded in long rambling lectures on Aesthetics as a science.... You should have heard all my bitching and moaning (between unplanned naps) when I got it into my head to read The Phenomenology of Spirit. Unabridged. 🤦‍♀️ Actually, your life is probably complete without that experience. Don't get me wrong, the Hegelian master-slave dialectic is fucking BRILLIANT and understanding it (whether you reject taking part in it or embrace how it informs your future life choices to succeed in the world) will clarify how you understand your own actions/reactions and how others behave and history and geopolitics. In fact, I would claim that you need to read Engels and Marx critiques of colonialism-capitalism's exploitative aspects and even a large number of existentialist/nihilist philosophers as a continuum and discussion of what it's like to exist within a societal framework of master-slave dialectic.  Master-slave dialectic is a fucking masterful brilliant and important concept! Life altering, and I believe it should be taught in varying levels of detail/complexity starting in middle school to help kids learn to navigate bullying and tricky forms of interpersonal relationships and how to develop healthy relationships rather than toxic ones. That said, you definitely do not need to and should not read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit unabridged to help you understand his penultimate contribution to philosophy/psychology. There are WAY better explanations of it than Hegel, even if he was the first to define/explain it, and there really isn't much else in that dense mass of word spaghetti worth the time/effort to untangle it. 

 I'm about 2/3 of the way through the 40pges of Hegel's summary of Hegel's theories on aesthetics and so far he has concluded that taste is elusively subjective and cannot be completely reduced to scientific classifications but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. He still seems to be developing toward his point, but he hasn't actually gotten there yet. Also a lot of invective about how society training to critique art destroys the enjoyment of it and some name dropping calling out of some of his least favorite then contemporary critics and hwy they're wrong. Pretty obvious, nothing earth shattering, and now I have saved you the trouble of slogging through all his torturous sentences. After it is a section of about equal length written by Hegel's best known most promising disciple philosopher who never abandoned Hegel's teachings that gets into how Hegel lectured on his philosophy of aesthetics in various specific art forms. Not sure if I will tackle that today or switch to something else for a bit before coming back to it. Especially since Spock just hopped up on my lap curled up purring for a long snoozle. (Anyone wanna lay odds as to whether I finish this text or succumb to the soporific afternoon nap effect brought on by the combination of Hegelian prose, sleeping cat, and last half of a pot of coffee (which I drink to help calm the ADHD so I can focus calm me down, all my life I've been able to fall asleep immediately after or even while consuming large amounts of caffeine.)) 

P. S. I do love reading philosophy, I own a lot of it and I read it by choice. I just don't love reading Hegel. In fact, there are very few German philosophers whose works I enjoy reading.... I love to re-read my favorite Greek philosophers, Roman stoics, Enlightenment French and existentialist French, and British/Scottish empiricists, and the political philosophers from Machiavelli to the American founding fathers to Ortega y Gasset to Hannah Arendt and I fucking love them all. But I can genuinely say that I have never reread (willingly or unwillingly) ANY of the German schools of philosophy except Nietzsche and Heidegger and Schopenhauer. Hegel is my least favorite to read, Kant my second least favorite to read, Kierkegaard my third least favorite to read. (I don't have enough Christianity in my character or my unexamined premises to agree with much at all of Kierkegaard's premises or conclusions... IMHO, he's worse than Medieval theologians for how deeply fundamentally Christian he is in his worldview and philosophy.) And yet. I have read all of them, generally unabridged, and will do so again in the future with their texts I haven't yet read in entirety as some sort of form of masochistic "but maybe there are some gems in here if I just go to the effort of panning through all the schlock to find it."