Reading great books is like eating a great meal. There are some things you want to enjoy slowly. In a great book, the words, ideas, and experience need time to echo in your mind and soul. With books, it's really better to be a gourmet than just a gourmand. A few great ones will benefit us much more than many average ones.
Great books can support and parallel many aspects of the cultivated life.
It could be easy to make the case that reading a good novel that is several hundred pages in length can itself, as an act, and regardless of the book, help cultivate the virtue of patience. But so can sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office, or standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. So maybe I shouldn't pursue that point any further. The real benefits of reading flow out of the content. Encountering various virtues and vices in the lives of fictional characters can help us powerfully to refine our own development of virtues and avoidance of vices.