That stack of books you’ll “get to someday” is a list of conversations with dead geniuses you keep canceling.

An unread book is an appointment you keep rescheduling with somebody who spent years working out what you are currently guessing at. Nobody else will hand you that much of their best thinking for the price of an evening. The stack is not a guilt object, it is a queue of available help sitting three feet from your bed. Postponing it is a decision you remake every night without noticing you made it.

Take the one on top and read ten pages a day. Not the whole thing, ten pages. At that rate the stack clears in a year and you will have had thirty of those conversations.