It's a metaphorical use of "inhale", but it doesn't seem to have caught on in BE yet.
I just found this example, in an article about baseball and writing fiction. The reference this time (I guess) is to devouring a book:
"Cheever is what I thought I wanted that night, a writer who knew something about joy if not a lot about baseball. I picked
Bullet Park (1969), which I’d first read in the summer of 1977 — the summer I also
inhaled Angell’s
Five Seasons."
Philip Roth’s retirement lesson