Reading lists are aspirational by design
They exist to point at the field, to cover different interests, and to give you somewhere to go if you become fascinated. They are not calibrated to your available hours, because they were not written with your available hours in mind.
Which means the skill is triage, and nobody teaches it, so students default to the only strategy they know from school: start at the top and work down. That is the worst possible order, because the list is not sorted by importance.
How to actually triage it
- Ask which are essential. Directly, of the lecturer. They will tell you — often quite happily — and it is astonishing how few students ask.
- Read the essential ones properly. Slowly, arguing with them.
- Skim the rest to a purpose. Not front-to-back. Three passes: what does this claim, does it matter to me, do I need the detail.
- Read the thing everyone else skipped if you want to stand out. The item nobody read is where an original point in an essay comes from.
Read to a question, not to completion
Reading with no question in mind is how an hour disappears with nothing retained. Before opening anything, know what you want from it — what claim you're checking, what gap you're filling. Then the reading has a stopping condition, which is the thing an aimless read fundamentally lacks.
This is also where asking a document questions directly genuinely changes the economics: you can find out whether a source addresses your point in thirty seconds, and then read the part that does — properly, closely, like a person.