askchapo

For academic materials (especially textbooks!), if you aren't skimming first, you are doing it wrong. Somebody else described skimming in depth in the comments.

I really benefit from using the pomodoro technique. The default split is 25 minutes work to 5 minutes break, but you can adjust the work bit to be shorter if 25 minutes is too much.

With reading for pleasure, you can do audio books if it helps. It is morally and intellectually equivalent to paper books, although don't try to multitask audiobooks with anything more complex than cooking a recipe you already know, cleaning, or driving.

Another thing to try is setting a page or time limit. You don't necessarily have to sit down and read an entire chapter. Just set your bookmark 5 pages in and read until there. If you get to the five page mark and you want to continue, keep going! If not, take a break.

It is important to find a genre or author you actually enjoy if you want to build a habit of reading. Like others have mentioned, don't torture yourself with a book you aren't enjoying. I am a big fan of Haruki Murakami. My favorites of his are Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The genre is magical realism, in which the fiction is grounded in reality until something intriguing and possibly supernatural happens.

For entry-level bite-sized reading, I really liked Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and its sequel. Very intriguing premise; you can go back in time, but only at a specific seat in a specific cafe, and if you don't get back before the coffee gets cold, bad stuff happens.