Reading the Scriptures can be helpful if you are inclined to want to read, but we can't recommend it to everyone. The reason I edited the "20 Suttas" was because the scriptures are actually difficult to read, they are not easy at all. They are very much like a skeleton type teaching where the Buddha will give basic points, but then he doesn't fully explain it. And so, for a lot of people, when they read the scriptures, they only get an intellectual understanding, they don't really get some real practice methods.
Something like the D/D Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation is a wonderful technique, it will help you tremendously, but it's not in the scriptures, it's not there at all. However, the essence of the method is in the scriptures. The way the Buddha taught, he was teaching to open his vision to others. Everything that we are teaching is based on something in the scriptures, we have just kind of opened it up, because the scriptures, as I said are difficult to read, they are more of a skeleton.
So for some people, it's actually not helpful to read the scriptures, because they get too much information that isn't fully explained. When I compiled the 20 Suttas I didn't translate any, I only edited them. I looked at least at six different translators, some did the entire lot, some only did a few, but I used as many as six different translators and looked at how they translated the Sutta. From their translations, I picked the best one or modified it a little bit as to how I could understand it from a practice level, so that it could flow better, because there were some clear mistakes in some of the translations. Then after each, Sutta I give a few suggestions of how to look at it. I don't explain it, but how to look at it. So if you have the 20 Suttas and you read through them and my notes, you get more of an understanding of how to actually read the scriptures and get benefit from them. After you have done those 20 it will be easier to read the rest of them, of which are hundreds, if you are interested.