Aristotle wrote that a good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment within the Greeks’ special understanding of leisure4; and finally, the life of contemplation.5 So, too, the “good reader.” There is the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge. We are awash in this life. There is the second life, in which reading’s varied forms of entertainment are to be found in abundance: the sheer distraction and exquisite pleasure of immersion—in stories of other lives; in articles about
