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What's your general reading strategy in the context of a daunting reading list?

Hi all, a bit of a meta discussion here.

I've always been one of those people who has insisted that if you didn't read something carefully, you didn't read it at all. In my academic life, I've prided myself on being someone who maybe hasn't read as much as some of my colleagues have claimed to, but for the things I did read, I read them very well--I think there's some moment during a Derrida interview where the interviewer points to the expansive bookshelves in his office and asks him, "how many of them have you read?" and he replies in jest, "just these three--but I read them really, really well." That's sort of what I mean. I take my time to understand every sentence, I take voluminous notes, and as a result there's a relatively small number of texts that I am very familiar with.

However, over the course of the writing of my MA thesis, I've come up against the limitations of this way of doing things--namely, my very sparse literature review and general lack of serious engagement with secondary sources. I have a lot of (what I think are) profound things to say about the book that is central to my thesis, but it is largely my own reaction to the text with very little engagement with the surrounding scholarship.

Now, for the MA thesis, I was sort of able to get away with this insofar as the particular topic I chose had to do with a topic that was almost entirely neglected in my area, such that there were really only maybe three or four papers that were directly related to what I'm working on.

For the PhD, however, I am jumping over to a totally different area, and this is an area that has arguably been one of the most hotly debated topics in French intellectual life for the last 40 years. As a result, I'm faced with a reading list that, with my reading style, I will never be able to even come close to touching in the span of four years. I'm hopefully beginning my PhD next winter semester, and there's already over 350 items in my Zotero folder for this project--many of them are short papers, but a significant number of them are long, dense books that would take me, at minimum, a full semester to read through "carefully".

Has anyone been faced with a similar issue before, and if so, how did you adapt your reading style to match this new challenge? What's the best way to intelligently skim a long, dense, complicated book?

**EDIT: Thanks for all the great words of advice, everyone! This has certainly helped me put a few things in perspective. I think the main takeaway for me, personally, is to continue to narrow my topic until the relevant reading list is much less daunting. I have a habit of being overly ambitious (I'm currently feeling the sting of this as I struggle to finish my MA thesis) and when I first described my dissertation idea to my future supervisor, he told me that it wasn't a dissertation, it was a life's work. The project is significantly more narrow now but not narrow enough, I think.**
gpt
Prioritize and change your reading technique according to this prioritization. There will be secondary sources you really only need two paragraphs from, there will be others that are central to an issue you're discussing. Develop an ability to switch between careful reading for what is important and quick surveys to look for what is important. Don't feel shy to use the references someone else gives in a paper or literature review you think is important as a guide for what to focus on. Don't feel shy to read abstracts, scan tables of contents, and ctrl-F for key words as techniques to survey large bodies of literature in search of what looks to you like stuff of the most importance.

On widely discussed topics, no one can read everything. Be confident in defending this principle, with reference to your reasoning for how you select what to focus on. If that's not enough to get you through, strongly consider narrowing your thesis topic until it *is* enough to get you through.