Rather, it serves as a source of amusement or interest or even in not so rare cases, liberation. Reading brings into play a number of pleasures that are cognitive, psychological and even somatic. In literary reading we get to play with identities, with words, with possibilities. We get to laugh over jokes that are centuries old and to empathize with people whom we could never even hope to meet. We get to see how the world is and how it might be.
Reading seems like too much fun to be important.
But given the depth and the permanence of the pleasures and possibilities of reading, we should be bold and argue on behalf of reading. We should not be ashamed to say that reading does not present a diversion from our most serious tasks, which seem increasingly tied to information. Instead, literary reading is an important fulfillment of those tasks.