I can’t point to when I started the habit, but every night, I get ready for bed, and then I read in bed until I fall asleep reading, waking only briefly to flip my e-reader’s cover closed and put it on the nightstand.
I also can’t point to exactly when I realized that I could get a lot out of books that I didn’t particularly love. Maybe it was high school, when I realized that Frankenstein, a book that had a bad reputation among some friends that were too cool to read the books that they were forced to read, was actually very, very good.
It was almost certainly at some point during college, particularly as grad school forced me to read bad books and worse papers and use the things I learned from them to build arguments.
I permanently put down a lot of books, but I think my tolerance is probably a bit higher than your average reader. Though I’m truly happiest when I have a book that I’m looking forward to reading, I often find myself reading a book that I’m actively not enjoying.
My first impulse was to compare this to Type II Fun — “Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect” — but I don’t think that’s quite it. I think there’s a pretty simple matrix you can imagine in your head for any given thing you’re doing: how much is this rewarding now, and how much is this rewarding later?
Good books are rewarding now. You’re having fun! That’s great. These are the books I read in one sitting, the ones I lose sleep to read. Great books are rewarding now, and also stick with you; maybe you learn something about the world, or yourself, or are constantly thinking about the plot or the tricks that it employs or the puzzle within the book or how it was important to your life or whatever.
Bad books are not rewarding now. They use contrived language, have frustrating characters or plots, or are otherwise uninteresting. That doesn’t preclude them from being rewarding later, though; maybe you learn something about the world, or yourself, or …
