But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.
My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.
I am also not a lifelong reader, I didn't start reading until college. My girlfriend read a ton and the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to come out, I got caught up in the excitement and read all the books. Ever since then, I've read pretty steadily. Interesting though, it wasn't social media or anything that slowed my reading to a trickle, it was audiobooks. I freakin love them when the narrator is good. Anyway, that's how I got back to reading and now I haven't listened to an audiobook in a while. :)
As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.
To that end, if your goal is just to read more, there is no reason to worry about how substantial your books are. However, if you goal is to read more substantially, you should start by aiming a bit higher than where you are. Achieve that, then adjust target.
Progress, then, can come either in more volume of reading where you are; or in more substantive reading. Either are valid, to me.
To take this to the exercise. If your goal is to do a fast mile, agreed that just walking the dog is unlikely to help. If your goal is to be physically active, simple walks punch well above what people think they do.
Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read.
(Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade. And skip things that aren't enjoyable to actually read.)
I am in complete agreement with you that 99% of books are crap. It's the 1% that you hopefully want to get around to reading, and those are typically not the easiest reads.
Given those two options, the reasonable one is the latter. Just miss a few messages and calls, control your own time.