I bought a book the other day, and it is no great work of art, but it will be fun to read–action, mystery, good tough guys, hot sexy women, suspense, chases, gun fights, love scenes, evil rotten bad guys, breathless landscapes, strange religious manias, mistaken identities, stunning denouement, victory lap for the hero and his girl. There are times when you just cannot read another serious book for your research, another book on literary theory, another article of literary criticism before you start to question your own sanity. Reading for pleasure, for many of us academic ivory tower sorts, is a lost art, or at least we have forgotten that reading can be fun, a vicarious thrill, an intriguing mystery, a heart-breaking romance, an existential journey on blue roads, a search for meaning in a nihilistic culture of rampaging consumerism, a coming-of-age epiphany. Reading is fun, but when it is also your job you might lose track of the fun. If reading ceases to be fun, then it can only be work, and too much work makes Jack a dull boy. When I started out reading as a small child, all of reading was fun. I read about adventures, dinosaurs, soldiers and battles, inventors, magicians, wizards, flying. The world of fun reading is almost boundless. Later I discovered Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, Daniel Dafoe and Bram Stoker, Stephen King and Peter Straub, and reading was still fun. Somewhere along the way, however, I went to college and starting reading things that were more informational and less fun and reading became a burden. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved reading, but when reading is a chore, you start to hate doing it, and even the books you loved in the past become a part of that burden and those chores. Nevertheless, even during college I learned to love Hemingway and Faulkner, Shakespeare and Wilde, Eco and Borges. They made me read Cervantes, and I found out he was a genius. Then I read García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Rulfo, Castellanos, Allende, and Carpentier, and I was hooked on reading forever. Reading for pleasure is an escape for the imagination, a letting the monsters go, a moment to forget about the pressures of the day and let the mind wander into other places and times, to walk in the footsteps of heroes looking for the Grail, of detectives trying to return social stability to an unstable world, of explorers headed to the center of the earth, of a scientist traveling into time. So I have no problem with buying a nice, fat potboiler for reading on the plane, or before going to bed, or for a lazy Sunday afternoon. No, I can’t pull a don Quijote and lose myself in endless narratives of fantasy and adventure, but from time to time, it cannot really hurt. A giant here and there, an evil villain, a frantic chase across an urban landscape, climbing mountain, riding a griffin, skulking through an underground passage, a dead body or two, a tragic love affair (although all love affairs are tragic), impending doom. You know you love it too, a guilty pleasure that lurks within your library that you pull out and read from time to time. You feel nostalgic, you know every word, you remember entire descriptions, but it is a pleasure, and you will return time and time again, and you love it.