Let us first consider who actually reads. It seems they are either people who have time to waste or students who are forced into it. Many time wasters belong to the adolescent sophomoric crowd who seek to consolidate "virtual" or bookish experience to compensate for their lack of the real life variety. Others include retired folks who have nothing better to do besides feeling nostalgic over narratives mostly concerned with younger people. The students, on the other hand, see a kind of transcendental evolution of representation in literature. "In less convoluted terms, they believe that one of the greatest tasks of humanity is to represent what humanity experiences, and literature is the highest form of such representation because it is so concrete and can describe a temporal sequence. Paintings and sculptures and such are trapped into a single time or a smearing of brief finite times. More abstract art is utterly dependent on the narrative explanation of its "concept". Music is also temporal but it is too abstract. Movies are too brief and external (it is very difficult to film internal monologue). And so we have the book. However, such study is utterly useless. And it cannot be concluded that other disciplines do not boast their own special brands of concrete narratives.
What ties both time wasters and students together is this deep escapist quality of reading. And this escapism is wholly personal, selfish, and alone- just like masturbation. It is the opiate of the intellectually deranged.
But given all this, it's clear that reading is a rather trashy pastime.
Don Quixote read too much -
