i went into barnes and noble today with a girl i like on some sort of pseudo-date, and i realized that almost every book in certain sections looked interesting, but it occurred to me that even if I read one of those books each day for the rest of my life, I would never be able to read them all - nor would my brain be able to integrate all the information gained from each book.

Thus, an intellectual must strive to read material of the highest quality - which is what I've been doing subconsciously all along.

Skip the classics (Plato, etc) and go straight to the philosophers who interpretted them and made their own theories based on them -- I recommend the Germans (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc)

Then, the next step up would be to read material written by those who were inspired by the aforementioned philosophers. These individuals invariably strayed from philosophy into more practical fields, such as psychology, economics, or language. They include the likes of Jung, Chomsky, or Derrida