It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude.

A small number of things carry most of the weight, and the rest blend into a general mass you will not remember. Out of everything you read this year, two or three will still be working on you in a decade, and the same is true of the people you meet. The difficulty is that you cannot reliably tell in advance which ones they will be.

Give the few that have already proved themselves more of your time, including a second pass at a book that changed something. And when something in the mass turns out to matter, notice it and stay with it rather than moving on.