My prominent reading strategy is called (only by me I guess) skip and cut. I read the same way I listen to music - If something is boring I skip. If I skip too much I throw the book away for another.

I'm not claiming this methodology to be original, smart, useful or mature. It's just the answer to the posed question.

[E: also this seems a fair opportunity to quote my favorite author]

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.