I love what you are saying!

I have always been a reader. It was a necessary consequence of growing up poor. Not the kind of poor that does not allow you lovely things, but the kind of poor that means meals were optional and new clothes were items handed down many times.

One free thing was a library card. So I filled my mind and imagination with beautiful stories and a fountain of facts. Over time the stories and knowledge generated compound interest, and I could build a life better than the one I grew up with. All thanks to the skill of reading.

Nowadays, I don't read as much, but I still work through around a hundred books a year. It is my preferred way of learning and the return on investment on time spent reading has been spectacular.

The great scientist Carl Sagan said in his essay, The Path to Freedom (co-authored with Ann Druyan):

"For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children's game "Telephone," over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate with the best teachers the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses."

And in Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory, he said:

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic."

If I may add to your advice, here goes:

1. Always carry a book. With all our devices, it is simple to do just that. So when you get a moment, you can read. I spent many a happy minute or hour, lost in a book while waiting in line, waiting for someone, waiting ...

2. Read only what interests you or expands you. In reading about what interests you, many other things may appear and send you in new directions.

3. Don't feel pressured to finish a book you don't enjoy. Life is too short, and there are many other exciting books to be discovered.

Happy reading!