I don't believe sheer reading volume is the key here. I speak from some experience. A long, long time ago, I did a degree in English literature. This was a bad

I don't believe sheer reading volume is the key here. I speak from some experience. A long, long time ago, I did a degree in English literature. This was a bad name for it as a lot of it wasn't English. Or literature for that matter. But over the course of three years I must have read in the order of 300 seriously sized books / texts and a bunch of other secondary material. Only a handful of memories stand out, out of a small swimming pool of ink. The Greek tragedies, some 20th century drama, and Chaucer. What I really memorised though was what I _wrote_. My _essays_ are still easy to recall: parentheses in Thomas More; control of space in Ben Jonson; body integrity in Greek tragedy. I can still remember them 15 years on. I didn't really like my English degree, and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did gain a lot through the process of writing. I synthesised knowledge and developed my skill for spotting patterns. I forced myself to write original observations week in week out. I made myself start with an intimidating blank page and end with an artefact I could call my own. (These things became part of my make-up as a software engineer, which is a job that rewards those willing to start from blank pages) My advice is to match time spent reading with time spent writing. There's a reason why traditional pedagogy entails writing essays, not just sheer volume of reading. You are as smart as what you can write, not what books are on your shelf.