A friend asked me yesterday how it is that I am so disciplined about reading. I perceive a few reasons.
First, I retired early, which means I have a lot of time for reading! But, then again, I planned it this way, because I knew that I wanted to pursue a more contemplative lifestyle at this stage in life.
Second, there's my disposition. Although I was rather lazy in my younger days, by my late twenties or early thirties I had become much more conscientious and disciplined.
Third, there are skills involved. Especially now that I'm not distracted with work and Internet stuff all the time, I'm able to concentrate on weighty texts for long periods of time. However, even in my working days I cultivated what Cal Newport (in his book Deep Work) calls the "journalistic style", whereby I'm able to dip in and out of a task and quickly regain focus. Especially in my final job at Mozilla, I had to do a lot of context switching, and I got pretty good at it.
Fourth and more fundamentally, most of my reading is centered around answering big questions.
The trial run for this practice was a reading program I put in place ~20 years ago to solve, at least to my own satisfaction, the question of what caused the Industrial Revolution and, more generally, the emergence of modernity. The books involved were large historical tomes on political economy, culture, and technology going back to the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on England since that's where the Industrial Revolution really took off.
I have another long-term reading program in place to understand America: its origins, immigrant groups, historical experience, political economy, culture, literature, music, philosophy, etc. This is a topic to which I return regularly as I become interested in various aspects of the phenomenon.
Some of my reading programs are motivated by a desire to write books that answer a big question or that represent a deep encounter with a great thinker. An example is my reading program about Aristotle: over the last decade I have read probably 50,000 pages by and about Aristotle!
Most recently I've instituted a reading program about aesthetics, especially musical and poetic aesthetics; here the goal is to better understand the arts as a path to wisdom, and at a personal level to understand how I can do a better job in my own artistic activities.
All of these questions can be seen to exist in a hierarchy whose underlying theme is my drive for self-knowledge and sagacity: I'm an American who is immersed in (yet somewhat detached from) modernity, engaged in writing music and poetry, trying to live an examined life, and seeking perspective from some of the great thinkers and wisdom traditions of the past. It all fits together, which is why I am so disciplined about the particular books I read.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)