Give abandonment official permission
The single most liberating rule is that you are allowed to stop. Not every book is for every reader, and certainly not for every year of a reader's life. Fifty pages is a generous trial; if you are dreading it, put it down without ceremony and pick up something else the same evening, so that the stopping does not become a gap.
Guilt is what kills reading habits, because a half-abandoned book sits on the table radiating reproach until you stop looking at the table altogether. Move it to a shelf. You may come back to it in three years and love it. That happens more often than you would think.
Attach it to something that already exists
New habits rarely survive on willpower; they survive by hitching themselves to an existing routine. Read for the length of one cup of tea after dinner. Read for the fifteen minutes between getting into bed and turning off the light. Read on the commute instead of scrolling — a paper book is easier here than an e-reader, because there is nothing else on it.
The physical set-up matters more than people admit. A chair with a decent light beside it, a small table for the cup, the phone charging in another room rather than face-down within reach. If your phone is on the arm of the chair, you are not reading; you are waiting to be interrupted. Fifteen genuinely uninterrupted minutes beats an hour of the other kind.
