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As others said it differs a lot from book to book.
Primarily I read to be entertained. Though my definition of entertained seems to differ quite a bit from what most other people mean. For me, entertainment is learning something I didn't know or hadn't considered or had never seen in quite that light. Even with fiction I am generally looking for that.
What happens to you after you finishe a book, good or bad?
It is very rare for me to just be reading one book at any one time. Currently, for example, I am reading four books and that is a bit on the low side of average.
Do you put it away and not think about it or does it apply to your life in some way?
Both. I'm not exactly sure what "apply to my life" means but I don't often spend a lot of time thinking about a book after I've read it. But I do absorb it as I'm reading it. If it is relatively factual non-fiction then the information gets stored away (I have a very good memory in this regard).
If it is philosophy/opinion/analysis/etc. then it gets incorporated into how I think, my "arsenal" of points of view. While I have my own views on things, I like to think that in reaching my own conclusions I get to a point where I could accurately present and argue differing points of view and so reading is constantly remapping the mental architecture so to speak.
I'm not a serious fiction reader so generally what I am seeking in good fiction is that it put me completely inside a mindset or way of seeing the world different from mine. Something like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time does that for me.
But I also usually have trash fiction (generally genre sci fi but not always) that I use for environments where I can't read for any length in a single session so it doesn't really matter if I only read 2/3rds of a page then come back to it later.
Why do you choose to read certain books and why do some read easy and other take forever to read?
Non-fiction is generally a form of bibliography trawling (I follow book A with some tangentially related book B from the bibliography followed by book C, another tangential reference in book B) but that frequently jumps the rails for any number of reasons. When the thread dies out on me I usually reset to science popularization, pseudoscience/bad science, non-American history, or classics of philosophy and that gets me off on a new chain.
Fiction is frequently just wandering the aisles at B&N and picking something with an interesting cover. Then if I like it (generally I don't particularly) I try some other things by the same author until I get bored with that and then pick at random again.
I don't really experience the fast/slow thing. I read fiction and non-fiction at dramatically different paces but within that the speed of reading is pretty constant. But when a book is boring me I don't really experience any hesitation in trashing it and moving on.
Is there a satifaction or is it just to pass the time?
Sometimes the latter (why else would I be reading anything Michael Crichton has written in the last 15 years?) but mostly the former.
Have you ever finished a book or gotten halfway thru and nothing sunk in to where you had to start over again?
Only with trash fiction. I once was reading a Patricia Cornwell novel (and only the existence of Dan Brown keeps her from looking like a total hack) and accidentally skipped about 100 pages at some point and never noticed.
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