[I had this post in draft version for a long time, but never finished it. The question "Can one read too many books?" is again relevent now I'm member of the jury for management book of the year 2019 and I had to read a large selection of management books for the first round]
A while ago I read a Dutch article, called "The 6 dangers of reading too many management books". I wanted to post a comment about it, but I'm so annoyed now to see that I didn't save the link! So, all I can reflect on is the title.
Can one read too many books, or management books in particular? I love books, so for me it's easy to say "No!". I don't see it as a waste of time and I believe books help me in providing a different point of view and to learn new things. Last year, as member of the jury for Management book of the year 2018, I read about 70 books. I didn't read all of them fully from front to back, still it was a lot of reading. What I can say is that there are not many "good" management books, whatever that qualification means. Of course, a book can still be usefull for a certain reader group. The jury uses a number of criteria for selecting the management book of the year, such as: originality, actuality, lasting and use of reference materials.
Actually, I think there is more danger in reading too few (management) books. I once had a VP who had one favourite book, his Bible, which he referred to all the time (of course, the whole department had to read that one book). Because he hadn't read other viewpoints on the same topic, I found that his viewpoint was too optimistic. That is one thing reading multiple books or articles does, give you several points of view on a topic.
Maybe a danger of reading too many books, which applies to me, is that they don't stick. I don't use enough what's inside or don't reflect enough on my actions based on what I read in the book. Hence, I don't learn enough from the books that I read. I know it and I always intent to, but then there are new books appearing and I continue reading those books. I think I'm not alone here, otherwise there won't be so many books appearing each year.