I have read a lot of books in my lifetime. I am not a voracious reader, nor am I like an editor or a writer who devours a whole book in a day, but still I might average reading 20-30 books a year. I have a wide range of interests, but I am also very selective about what I read. As I have grown older I realized that I don't have time left to even finish all of the good books that I have already purchased and that are setting on my shelves. I also realize that I won't get the same return from reading a book as I did when I was an impressionable twenty year old. Instead, reading has become a type of thinking exercise.
I used to set goals to read a certain amount of books per year, and for awhile I even had a queue of books that I was planning to read. Sometimes a single book, liking Thinking Fast and Slow, would take months to read, but was worth it! Other reads, gripping novels like The Martian, I could finish in less than a week. But I noticed something as I started to acquire more books. Reading something good and interesting would make me think, and I enjoyed thinking even more than I enjoyed reading.
I started a morning routine of reading in the bath. Churchill took a lot of baths, and he would plan out his hyperactive day while taking a warm soak. I'm less ambitious. I read and I think. Lately I have taken to bringing a whole stack of books that I am currently reading into the bathroom with me. Instead of reading a single one for a half an hour or so, I read a few minutes of each one. I ponder, chew over, consider, summarize, critique, disagree with what I read. I let the words, the page or two from each book, sink in. I may not be taking in material very quickly, and I may also lose context on the idea of the book, but I enjoy hopping across worlds and interests and writing styles and personhoods.
I'm currently reading 12 books at once this way. These are Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham, Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea, The Elegant Universe by Brian Green, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek by Annie Dillard, The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou, My Midsummer Morning by Alastair Humphreys, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Sweet Spot by Paul Bloom, Very Bad People by Patrick Alley, and How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini, and Short Stories in French by Olly Richards and Richard Simcott. History, language, philosophy, science, travel, nature, management and maybe a little more.