It's much more important to get into the habit of reading consistently and at high rate! Then worry about where you point your newly developed reading skills. M

It's much more important to get into the habit of reading consistently and at high rate! Then worry about where you point your newly developed reading skills. Most people just don't read consistently. The hardest thing to convince new students who join my group is that every single day they need to alternate between reading at least one paper in their field or at least one random paper from somewhere else, and spend some time reading a book. Record everything into a bib file. Once you develop this habit you will end up with a massive bibliography by the end of say 5 or 6 years. Over 20 years of doing this I've read 1000 books (1 per week) and thousands of papers. Our more fun research projects have all come from random connections between ideas that never would have occurred to me without this broad knowledge base.