plenty of non-fiction books written for entertainment and one may read for
entertainment any book whatever. The result depends not so much on the
book or its contents as on the reader.

Recreation is now recognized as an essential part of education. And just
as physical recreation consists largely in the same muscular movements
that constitute work, only in different combinations and with different
ends in view, so mental recreation consists of intellectual exercise with
a similar variation of combinations and aims.

Somebody says that "play is work that you don't have to do". So reading
for amusement may closely resemble study--the only difference is that it
is purely voluntary. Here again, however, the written language is only an
intermediary; we have as before, the contact of two minds--only here it is
often the lighter contact of good-fellowship. And one who reads always for
such recreation is thus like the man who is always bandying trivialities,
story-telling, and jesting--an excellent, even a necessary, way of passing
part of one's time, but a mistaken way of employing all of it.

The best kind of recreation is gently stimulating, but stimulation may
rise easily to abnormality. There are fiction drunkards just as there are
persons who take too much alcohol or too much coffee. In fact, if one is
so much absorbed by the ideas that he is assimilating that the process
interferes with the ordinary duties of life, he may be fairly sure that it
is injuring him. If one loves coffee or alcohol, or even candy, so dearly
that one can not give it up, it is time to stop using it altogether. If a
reader is so fond of an exciting story that he can not lay it aside, so
that he sits up late at night reading it, or if he can not drop it from
his mind when he does lay it aside, but goes on thinking about the deadly
combat between the hero and Lord William Fitz Grouchy when he ought to be