Reading pleasure is protected by a set of permissions readers rarely grant themselves: the right not to read, to skip pages, to not finish a book, to reread, to read anything, to mistake a book for real life, to read anywhere, to dip in, to read aloud, and to stay silent. Framing these as rights, not lapses, removes the guilt that otherwise attaches to normal reading behaviour.
The verb 'to read' will not tolerate the imperative mood, a trait it shares with 'to love' and 'to dream'; you can order someone to read but the command produces only compliance, not desire. Pleasure in reading cannot be commanded into existence, only invited.
Parents who once read aloud to a child every night, asking nothing in return, abruptly withdraw the ritual once the child can decode print, converting a gift of pleasure into a graded obligation. The withdrawal of the free nightly story is offered as a moment where reading quietly turns from love into duty.
Skimming and skipping passages is not a failure of attention but a reader's active negotiation with a text, a way children instinctively make a long book their own. Granting permission to skip treats the reader, not the book, as the authority over how it is consumed.
Schooling that demands commentary, summary and critical dissection before a child has tasted the pleasure of a story teaches the student to fear the book and to perform understanding rather than to enjoy it. The apparatus meant to produce readers can manufacture reluctant ones instead.
Reading is defended here as valuable precisely because it serves no measurable purpose: it need not improve, inform or qualify the reader to justify itself. Seen this way, the demand that reading be useful is what strips it of its pleasure.