I used to sell used and rare books. At one time I had 35,000 books in my apartment. Now I'm indexing the second largest collection of works by and about R. Buckminster Fuller in the world. So I know what it's like to have a heck of a lot of books, and a need to organize them for use.

Books published since the mid-1960s will have an International Standard Book Number, a barcode or both. Use a scanner to enter these titles into a computer. Perhaps something based on the open source package zxing might be useful. Books published before the mid-1960s can be entered using image recognition software (perhaps Google Goggles) or by application of finger to keyboard.

As you index your books, patterns will emerge. Make note of them. Even if they are wrong or incomplete, they are a foundation to build on. Once your books are indexed, search online for lists of books containing the titles on your tentative reading lists. Someone else has already done that work, and again it is something you can build on. If by strange chance no one has ever looked at the same group of books as yourself, then any list you compile will be valid.

Sell one book for every book you read. It could be the book you just read, or a book you think you never will read, or a book chosen at random, or a book that will bring in good money. The point is to recognize your own mortality and that there is not enough time to read all the books worth reading. You'll meet yourself in the middle, with a core of books you read worth keeping and not a one you didn't that wasn't.

Subtract your age from the number one hundred. That's how many pages you should give a book before you decide it's not worth continuing. When you're young, you have to give them a good long fair shake. As you age, you get on with things. If you're not reading it, don't keep it.

You've already gone through some sort of filtering process to acquire them anyway, as part of your finals and six years of college. Have faith in that filtering, and simply start at one end and proceed to the other. Arrange them by size, as the Quran was arranged. Read them chronologically. Patterns will emerge. And diving in head first will prevent you dancing on the side of the pool, never getting your feet wet.

"One measures a circle beginning anywhere." - Charles Fort, "Lo!" (1931)

On the topic of books, time-efficiency, and productivity, here is the Washington Times on books and Tyler Cowen:

We should ask ourselves if reading a book we’re getting little out of is the best use of scarce resources.

[Cowen] takes his own advice, saying he finishes one book for every five to 10 he starts.

“People have this innate view — it comes from friendship and marriage — that commitment is good. Which I agree with,” he says. That view shouldn’t, he says, carry over to inanimate objects.

It’s not that he’s not a voracious reader — he finishes more than a book a day, not including the “partials.” He just wants to make the most of his time.

“We should treat books a little more like we treat TV channels,” he argues. No one has trouble flipping away from a boring series.

Books are another story. Mr. Cowen thinks our education instills the belief that books somehow are sacred. Not to him.

“If I’m reading a truly, actively bad book, I’ll throw it out,” he says. His wife will protest, but he points out that he’s doing a public service: “If I don’t throw it out, someone else might read it.” If that person is one of the many committed to finishing a book once started, he’s actually doing harm.

Mr. Cowen, who says he couldn’t finish Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” or John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.,” offers a more direct economic rationale. He notes that many up-and-coming writers complain they can’t break through in a best-seller-driven marketplace. “We’re also making markets more efficient,” Mr. Cowen says. “If you can sample more books, you’re giving more people a chance.”

Do any of you have the same problem?

Conjecture: a very large fraction of LWers have this problem.

I have somewhere in excess of 300 books on my to-be-read shelves. If there is a good solution to the problem, I'll be interested too. But I fear it's like dieting ("How do you lose weight?" "Eat less and exercise more." "Damn.") -- the only solutions are to buy fewer books or to find more time to spend reading them, and fiddling with reading lists and the like is second-order stuff. Which, I suppose, means that my advice on "how to approach this problem" is "Just do it" -- but it's advice I've been ineffective in applying to myself.

(Note: I am aware that it's possible that eating less and exercising more is not sufficient for some unfortunate individuals -- if, e.g., their bodies are misconfigured to prefer burning up muscle or something rather than excess fat. I claim no expert knowledge about whether that actually happens and, if so, how often. But, alas, it seems that eating less and exercising more is necessary.)

If it were important to have read any of them, you most likely would have already. This means that it's unlikely that the books are important, so just read whichever is on top of the pile or that you feel like reading.

A solution I've found to reading-list problems is this: find someone else interested in getting through a pile of books. You and this person can exchange 1 page chapter summaries once every few days, with great shame or some penalty attached to missing this deadline. (ETA: say, contribute five dollars to a pot for every day past a deadline for a chapter, where the person making the fewest contributions gets the pot at the end of the year, something like that). I've gotten through several (very boring but important) books in this way. I also recommend reading pomodoro style: give yourself one or two min per page, say.

As to organization: I say burn them all, and download e-books whenever possible. Then read them on an e-reader that can't go on the internet. Actual, physical books are horrible objects.