This last December, after years of almost doing it, my wife and I and my parents finally picked a book to read and discuss together. We almost picked something by Charles Dickens, but we decided to go for something easier and chose Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

We’re reading it on the computer, via Project Guttenberg—convenient but probably not the best way to get immersed in a book—and I’m enjoying it much more than I thought I would. Not the just charming little story itself, but the actual experience of reading it. After years of reading almost nothing but news items and opinion pieces and topical nonfiction books, it feels almost like a luxury, a vacation, to read this whimsical little tale that has no real-world import...