Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.
Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, . . . that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.
In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
I have to say that my kids, like every child in America, is completely absorbed with Harry Potter. And so, I have gotten sucked into it, too; I can't wait for the next one to come out. I am trying to figure out what happens with Harry and Voldemort. So we have been reading that.