The book you read for pleasure does not owe you a lesson.

Not everything you enjoy has to be converted into improvement. There is a habit of asking what a pleasure produced, whether it was worth the hours, and what you carried away from it. Applied to a novel, that habit turns reading into an errand. Some hours pay you while they last and owe you nothing afterward.

Read something this week with no plan to summarize it or mention it to anyone. If you catch yourself hunting for the takeaway, set the question down and go back to the sentence.