Set a quota small enough to be boring
Ambition is what kills long books. Deciding to read fifty pages a night works for three nights and then collapses. Pick a number you could manage on a bad day — ten pages, or a single chapter, or fifteen minutes — and treat anything beyond that as a bonus. A long novel divided by ten pages a night is a matter of weeks, not years, and the maths is genuinely reassuring if you do it once at the start.
Then attach it to something that already happens. After you've put the kettle on, before the lights go off, on the bus between two particular stops. Habits don't survive on enthusiasm; they survive by being stapled to an existing routine. Leave the book physically in the place where the habit happens, open, face down, so that beginning requires no decision at all.
Give yourself permission to read imperfectly
The rule that you must understand every line before continuing is a school rule, and it has no place in your own living room. Skim the long passages about ships, lineage or weather if they're losing you. Miss a name and carry on; it will either come back or it won't matter. Keep a scrap of paper in the front with four or five key names on it if the cast is enormous.
Audiobooks count. Long epics were spoken aloud for centuries before they were ever printed, and hearing one read well — while walking, cooking or folding washing — can unlock a rhythm that the page hides. Many people get on best by alternating: listening during the day, reading at night, picking up wherever the other format left off.
