I disagree that the average person's ability to read has degraded. The people spending dozens of hours per week on short form video wouldn't be doing deep studies 40 years ago. It might show my elitism a bit but I very much enjoy the economic edge the ability to focus and read abstract subjects has brought me.
Pretty reasonable advice. The Western Canon list seems like a couple lifetimes to get through. Does anyone know a decent way to estimate how long such a list would take to get through? I’m on year 4 of seriously reading as an adult and have touched the tip of the iceberg of this list(maybe half a dozen of these large works).
If you have a job, I suspect that eighty pages a week is a good pace for something like philosophy. Fiction can be a good deal quicker to read, at least if there is a strong narrative (i.e. "not Proust"); Four hundred pages a week seems doable. History would be somewhere in the middle.