Some may call it pretentious, but I don’t really understand why. Sure, you can enjoy a book by only looking at the surface details and not thinking about it very hard. You can just let it wash over you and not look for deeper meaning. Some books are written so as to not even have much more to them than those surface level things.

But you can also look deeper, think deeper, contemplate deeper, and feel more deeply about the things that you read, and overall have a deeper experience with a book if you train yourself to see more deeply into it. There are many books that are written with this kind of experience in mind. Why is it pretentious to point this out?