People ask about this a lot, so here's the honest answer.
The System
Paper books in the morning, before anything else. Not a lot — twenty or thirty minutes, sometimes less. But every day, before the screen comes on, before the email, before the news. A physical book and coffee.
Audiobooks on the walk. I walk every day, usually an hour. That's where most of the volume comes from. A good narrator can make a book feel like a completely different experience than reading it on the page — sometimes better, sometimes worse, always different.
That's it. That's the system. It's not complicated.
The Real Secret
The system isn't the secret. The secret is permission to quit.
I used to finish every book I started. I thought abandoning a book was a failure — mine or the book's. I was wrong.
Life is too short and the to-read pile is too tall to spend time with books that aren't working for you. "Not working for you" is not the same as "bad." Some books are brilliant and wrong for you right now. Some books are wrong for you forever. You don't always know which is which until you've given it a fair shot — fifty pages, maybe a hundred — and then you're allowed to put it down.
The books I abandon make room for the books I love. That's the math.
What I'm Reading Now
I don't usually talk about current reads until I've finished them — superstition, mostly. But I'll say I'm deep in something that's making me want to write faster, which is always the sign of a good book.
Check the Amazing Stories column for the full list. I review everything I finish.