Reading is great, it's interesting, its time consuming and it makes you smarter (its true, there are thousands of research things out there that state that!) but I'm a pretty slow reader, so it takes me a while to get through a fairly long book...
It took me about a year and a half to read "Wild Swans" (Which is an amazing book and I highly reccomend you all read it, I could write a 2000 word essay on chinese communism after i finished reading that book)