Dunno, however, if reading qualifies as such a task. Namely, the question is whether the same regions of the brain are engaged (and would be busy listening to music).
I'm not entirely sure it's even always true compared to silence. Sometimes I feel like other bits of my own brain can be competing for attention and that occupying them can be a win.
I've also read Adler's "How to Read a Book" and I don't think it's as useful as you make it out to be. Annotating is good but nowadays you can take notes easily on your phone which I found myself doing for each book I read/listen to. Also one of the advice you find in your example is how truly reading a book means reading it more than once. He mentions that the first read should be superficial and fast in order to prepare you for the second, more thorough read.
People used to memorize entire books by studying them for years. In a time before printing presses were a thing it was considered normal to spent long long hours learning the contents of a book by heart.
but would it really? a good way to know is by letting the author teach you the book. do you think it will take 50 hours? think of university courses in which the teacher is teaching their own book. they will not go through every line and details although they must have found the details important enough to be put in the book; yet you will learn key ideas that will help you grasp the subject.Even if you learn the details in depth ,when they are not useful for you, you will eventually forget them.
As for divine comedy, It is a work of art that can be interpreted in many ways , it inspires many people in different ways that even the author would not have imagined.
so if you spend 50 hours reading a non-fiction do you enjoy all of those hours? do you remember all the details you went through? if you are only going to remember some of the key ideas then why bother spending 50 hours on it?
That might not be the case if you are an obsessive classical music listener. Personally, as a fan of the Baroque played on period instruments etc. (the "historically-informed performance" style), the muzak versions of Bach played in public places really grind my gears.
Reading “thinking fast thinking slow” should not take 8-9 hours... it could easily take 50 (after all, it represents many years and thousands of hours of work by the preeminent thinker on the subject). Scholars have spent a lifetime studying the Inferno.
I am typing this as I stand in line at a coffee shop in nyc as a kid is listening to music while reading “sapiens”. How can you expect to meaningfully absorb this content in a distracted environment, no pen for annotations and your attention span completely under assault?
I believe humanity’s ascension over the past two hundred years is pretty clear proof that books (or the written word) work well as a form of knowledge transfer but they require you to work for it.
“there’s no such thing as free lunch”
Ps a good primer on this, for those who care, is Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”