There are a lot of books. Many are bullshit. Most are not worth (and never can be) read.[1] Going to primary sources helps, they're almost aways preferred to commentaries, though guides and maps may help. I span new material via bibliographies and citations frequently. This helps, somewhat, to burst bubbles.

I'm currently curating from a listing of 25k+ law articles on a topic of interest. Availability of those (free, online) has a huge influence. Thanks to the Library of Alexandra (Sci-Hub) and LibGen.

Adler's How to Read a Book is quite useful -- the synoptic approach especially.[2]

Making rapid assessments of suitability is crucial. Being prepared to revisit those assessments, either way, later, also. Developing indicators of crap or possible gold help immensely. Again, see Adler.

I spend considerabe time with older sources. They're often known to be wrong or inaccurate, but:

* The path they reveal in development of understanding is often hugely useful. To understand the bug, it helps to know how it came to be.

* The rhetorical and ideological battles to which they may have been part is usually now known, often spent. Literature -- science, technology, fiction, philosophy -- is all tremendously ideological, and being removed from the frame under which it was constructed, or being aware of it, helps immensely.

* One often finds one's own crazy notions expresed there, sometimes partially, sometimes far more clearly. I've generally found that the questions I've been most concerned with are in fact long-standing ones.

* Much current discussion retreads older thinking, though aparently unconsciousy and/or in complete ignorance.

The Copyright Abyss -- many materials published since 1924 -- is aboth a hinderance and a blessing. It's not complete (LibGen, Sci-Hub, ZLibrary, Open Library via Archive.org), but it is sufficiently effective that it tends to force consideration of earlier works.

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Notes:

1. The US Library of Congress houses 24 million catalogued books and over 168 million items in total.[3] Its annual reports show about 300,000 new book additions annually, a remarkably stable rate, since the 1950s.[4] Bowker issues about 300k ISBNs annually to traditional publishers, and another million to 'untraditional" (self-published) authors.[6] Google have estimated 129 million books were published, ever.[7] And there's the question of how many books can matter, culturally. About 3/4 of Americans read at least a bok a year,[8] which suggests a floor somewhere around 60 books over a lifetime. Given that there are other informational channels, how much information must be transmitted intergenerationally to preserve culture -- technically, socially, values, etc? "Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

3. https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-glance

4. https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-reports/ http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049 [4]

5. One of the exceedingly rare cases in which Hathi Trust is actually useful.

6. http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html

7. http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...

8. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fe...