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)