Discussion: making the most of our cookbooks

I started this thread to see if we can share some ideas about how to make the most of our cookbooks. Like many here, I find myself with (too) many cookbooks and not enough time to get through them all in an adequate way. Do you have any methods for exploring your cookbooks?

For example, do you make a few recipes from a new book when you get it? I've tried the strategy of 5 from each book, consecutively, but that can be tough, expensive, boring, and/or fattening, based on the book.

I've tried aiming for 1 from each book, but that feels daunting and also not thrilling enough. I wish I had the time and money to thoroughly cook from all my books as a project, day in, day out. But that's not possible either.

And just to complicate things---how does this type of project, along with participating in COTM, mesh with having some tried and true favorites that you'd like to repeat fairly regularly?

One thing that has helped is planning meals in advance. I keep a weekly/monthly plan on Evernote and I fill it in based on COTM participation and recipes I want to try. But I still feel all over the place. And I have roughly 230 cookbooks.

Let's help each other!