The Internet Archive provides 44 million books you can borrow for free, and Amazon's English language catalog contains at least a few dozen million book titles for sale. These two catalogs don't overlap completely, but I'll take the IA number as a conservative estimate: 44 million is roughly how many books are available to you as an English reader today.

Let's assume that 90% of those are objectively irrelevant to you because they are too niche or specialized for your needs. That leaves 4.4 million books you could read and potentially get something out of. The "potentially" is important, because most of them won't do much for you. In fact, the vast majority of those 4.4 million will be a net opportunity cost for you, because they will suck your time away from reading the few among them worthy of being called Damned Good Books.

A Damned Good Book is a book that changes your life. As you read it, you become a different person.

…this post is different. Continue reading in the browser.