I really love reading, because it's one of the only hobbies that I can just totally immerse myself into without worrying at all about anything else. Reading for fun is literally like getting teleported into a world of peace, comfort, and exhilaration, being able to enjoy a lifetime of exhilarating events in just a few hours.
The thing I love about it the most is that it feels like it even makes real life more exciting, because you can start to see how even the mundane everyday is just like a book, too! It might be a bit embarrassing, but at times I do end up mimicking heroes from the books I've read, and in my opinion it ends up all the better for it, since it imbues my usually more aimless conversation with passion and enthusiasm... in any case, it can help to animate even a boring moment by likening it all to just a fragment of the overall very exciting storyline.
In that way, I must say I take a special loving to light novels, because they eschew all the complicated bits of using any overly flowery language (unlike me…) and get directly to the drama, suspense, character action, and the like! The juicy bits! I even used to basically desire the same thing from regular books, since I remember skim-reading some of the early Harry Potter books (a bit before I was really grown-up enough to read them) and only reading the dialogue!
No matter what, I wouldn't mind being able to just read fiction every day for many hours, although sometimes other things do get in the way. The greatest joy of having gone on holiday and sworn not to use my laptop was being able to throw all those distractions away and read for at least 4 hours a day, not by force, but totally out of my own desire, and it was great. I felt like I enjoyed myself unbelievably well, and learnt a lot of new words and funny turns of phrase along the way.
And reading also gives you a time of slow pause, to let you drink in the nuances of language and to think about what each word means. Unlike a movie, it won't skip ahead without you, and in that regard it's totally at your own pace, letting you also match your thinking and reading together to go as fast or slow as you want. Moreover the imagery I'm able to see because of even the simplest of texts is so beautiful and stunning and immersive, I'm just ashamed I haven't been making more use of this ability until more recently!
I've fallen into various periods where I've not read awfully much, which has sadly atrophied my vocabulary over time; it probably peaked in year 11, where I'd known so many words as to always leave an impression on my English teacher. If I had to repeat my essays today, I'm not so sure I'd still be anywhere near as compelling… but, that's at least a little bit excuses by the thought that in the meantime, I have read in Japanese and German a fair bit, and I've been able to instead focus on learning to read those two more naturally, even to the detriment to my vocabulary in any one of them. It is my ultimate goal to master all of them, though, so I don't intend to compromise like this forever, at any rate.