Hi!

I got into history because it's related to basically all my interests and studies (Politics and society, Law, Political Science and even videogames). I never liked the approach of "Read a general overview first and find out what you like" that we kind of had in school, for me the classes were history as a set of facts to memorise, which i didn't find very inspiring, rather it was sometimes quite misleading.

I started reading mostly related to concrete issues where history was relevant to other things i was into, especially in politics. I guess it was sort of a "problem-solving" attitude to history, for example trying to think about what made some areas have or not have economic development. I think that was useful and sort of combated the "history as a set of facts" approach we mostly had in school. This type of approach is still mostly how i enjoy reading history, even if i intentionally do try and read more broadly to fill "gaps".

I would not worry too much about how much history there is, you have time to read about something else later, or you can just switch if whatever you are reading is boring. I would not worry that something is "too difficult" or "too academic" either for the most part, other than that sometimes the writing can be bad.

I guess i used a lot of Wikipedia, especially when i was younger. Now i usually have some book project(s) im reading + some history in uni classes + access to uni sources in general, but i still use wikipedia for some basic stuff. I also used youtube a lot, though now i am a bit more selective in what i watch now. I also did, and still do, buy books quite on a whim if i want to read about new subjects. I would not necessarily recommend that, hehe.

Honestly AskHistorians is also great and i'm sad that i didn't discover it earlier. Just following it lets me discover questions or fun issues i would not even have asked personally.