Lewis on books and readers.....

Part the Second:
     "Secondly, the majority, though, they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading.  They turn to it as a last resource.  They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up.  It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep'.  They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often with listening to the radio.  But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention.  When they are denied such attention and undistrubed reading even for  a few days they feel impoverished."
-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism