I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.

Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.

And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.

How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?