In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis argues against "literary Puritans"--people who think the right sort of reading must be serious, as in "grave" or "solemn." Instead, Lewis says to read correctly, readers must surrender to the spirit in which a work was written:

The existence of these literary Puritans ... has deterred me from applying the word serious to the right sort of readers and reading. It suggests itself at first as just the word we want. But it is fatally equivocal. It may mean, on the one hand, something like 'grave' or 'solemn'; on the other, something more like 'thoroughgoing, whole-hearted, energetic'. ...

A thing may be done seriously in the one sense and not in the other. The man who plays football for his health is a serious man: but no real footballer will call him a serious player. He is not wholehearted about the game; doesn't really care. His seriousness as a man indeed involves his frivolity as a player; he only 'plays at playing', pretends to play. Now the true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemnly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ'. What is meant lightly he will take lightly; what is meant gravely, gravely.... He will enjoy a kickshaw as a kickshaw and a tragedy as a tragedy....

This is where the literary Puritans fail most lamentably. They are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. I have listened to an undergraduate's paper on Jane Austen from which, if I had not read them, I should never have discovered that there was the least bit of comedy in her novels. After a lecture of my own I have been accompanied from Mill Lane to Magdalene by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverent suggestion that The Miller's Tale was written to make people laugh. And I have heard of another who finds Twelfth Night a penetrating study of the individual's relation to society. We are breeding up a race of young people who are solemn as the brutes ('smiles from reason flow') ... Solemn men, but not serious readers; they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.