Anyway keep up the good work and I`ll keep listening as I drive through the English countryside making delivery’s.

Granted, many of those books were only 100-200 pages in length, which were typical for short story collections and novels written before the books like the massive novel Shogun came out (over 1,000 pages) and the mammoth tomes by Stephen King. However, if you look at the number of pages I read per year (yes, I kept track of that information) instead of the book count, my annual reading did not change much when I switched to the bigger books. I may have read less books per year but the number of pages stayed pretty consistent.

Sadly, in the past few years, my reading rate has gone down considerably: I’m lucky if I read half as many books and pages as I read 12 years ago. Mostly, that’s a time management thing. My love for reading hasn’t gone down any, I just devote less time to the effort. Last year I started changing that by going back to my old habits. It’s hard sometimes but I’m working on it because I love reading.

Think about what motivates you to read. If “love of reading” is not part of that motivation you may want to reevaluate your whole reading hobby/activity. Having reading as a chore is not a good thing as it sucks away that motivation. Reading books for classes in college sapped my motivation but I persevered and came up with new strategies. If a book I was reading for a class was demotivating me, I would cheat and read a quick Heinlein book or something from Arthur C. Clarke. Reading fun stuff helps out a lot when you have to read the less fun stuff.

It’s clear to me you love writing more than anything else. Sure reading suffers as a result but you love writing so much! You can’t feel guilty about not reading enough when your primary love is writing.