makes you want to take some time off and read, doesn't it?
At some point I realized that there was no reason I had to wait until retirement to realize this fantasy, and now many of my Saturdays begin with a walk to a local park, followed by several hours of reading. It's just as pleasurable as I had expected, and it's actually been surprisingly easy to make this happen now that I've made it a priority. It doesn't even take a whole day; there are plenty of Saturdays when I go out to read during the morning and still have the rest of the day free for whatever chores or social engagements are vying for my attention. I even find myself doing it on weekday afternoons evenings, especially in summer when the days are long.
Another thing that has led to me reading more books is just giving myself permission to read books in increments of 15 minutes or less during random moments of downtime. Moments on/waiting for the tram or between phone meetings that I would have spent checking Twitter on my phone can just as easily be spent reading a book. This isn't so good for certain kinds of content that you might want to devote more attention to, but I've found that I'm perfectly capable of enjoying fiction in 10-minute increments without significantly diminishing my enjoyment of it. And oftentimes, reading bits of a novel throughout the day often gives me a certain amount of momentum that makes me want to continue reading the book during my free time in the evening during time that I might have otherwise spent watching TV, browsing reddit/facebook, etc.
If we take in the finiteness of lifetime as a factor, most of our decisions will simply stop making sense. Life should be spent with no clear boundary other than it is finite.
I tallied it up and last year I read 58 books averaging 1.8 hours of reading a day.
It's great!
As an aside I highly recommend reading "How to Read a Book". I don't recommend studying every detail, there is a lot in there I don't think is particularly valuable, but some of it really shifted how I thought about and approached reading.
However, for the right books, audiobooks can be even better in my experience; books where you want some "wisdom" and feelings more than concrete stuff, and where a peaceful, somewhat-slow is appropriate.
I listened to Lab Girl, an intimate autobiography, read by the author, and it was fantastic. I am now going over a book on buddhism, and because I don't really care about remembering the details of Maharana's life, I love listening instead of reading. With such a book, reading faster doesn't seem to make much sense, I wanna go slow and savior its lessons.
In any case, it's been a good complement to my traditional reading; even when it isn't the best way to read a book, it's a fantastic way to make the most of commuting or doing chores.
I didn't find it that hard to listen to Dune compared to listening to, say, Peter F. Hamilton's works. For me it all is something that becomes entirely attention consuming.
Your mileage may vary!
A good book is something you want to take slowly and really read. Digging in and unpacking the meaning from interesting turns of phrase. I just don't get that from listening. I need to see the words.
Maybe for history, textbooks, or mindless pageturners it could be useful. But for a capital-B Book, no, that doesn't do it for me.
Early literature was all based on rote learning and spoken tongue. We still have some of those works left from preliterate times. Socrates, Homer, etc. Although, 'pre-literate' literature does sound a bit self contradicting.
As to early literature, I just got done reading Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey. she goes into that a little in the introduction, about the difference between something you recite and something you read, and about how the odyssey is sort of in-between those two things; clearly it wasn't just homer taking dictation, but it also clearly does contain some artifacts unique to an oral storytelling tradition.
I'm now down to ~25 books a year and feel like it fits me well.