If you read books for 3.5 hours or more a week, a Yale team found your risk of dying over the next 12 years was 23% lower than someone who reads no books. This person did more than three weeks of that on one Sunday. They followed 3,635 Americans over 50, adjusted for things like wealth, education, health, and depression, and found that people who read books do better than people who read newspapers and magazines. For the record, the 23-month extension is the unadjusted result, so once you adjust for confounding variables, the protective effect is about 4 months. In another study, researchers at Rush University measured the frequency with which 1,903 people (average age 80) read books, wrote letters, played games, etc. The most active among them were diagnosed with Alzheimer's around 94, while those least active were around 89. When the Rush researchers performed an autopsy on 695 of those brains, they found that activity level had nothing to do with how many plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's were present. But the more active mind resisted onset for about five years longer. Now, fiction has a smaller edge. A 2018 review of 14 experiments found that reading a story slightly improves people's ability to correctly guess how other people think and feel compared to when they read non-fiction or do nothing. These studies are observational, so I'm taking my chances. The Yale cutoff is 30 minutes a day. A 12-hour Sunday reading session gives you the equivalent of 24 daily 30-minute reading intervals.