Why my father was right about Harlequin Romances

When I was a teenager, I read many, many Harlequin Romances.  I am not bragging.  I am confessing.
My father never liked it, and I wish I had been more into pleasing my father and less into pleasing myself.

Robert E. Lee did not like his children reading fiction.  He wrote to his wife:

Let him [his son Rooney] never touch a novel.  They print beauty more charming than nature, and describe happiness that never exists. They will teach him to sigh after that which has no reality, to despise the little good that is granted us in this world and to expect more than is given.

H.W. Crocker III says that Lee enjoyed many of the simple pleasures of life precisely because he forsook wallowing in "unattainable fantasies."  He understood that original sin was a reality to live with for the redeemed.
Though we may not adopt Lee's strict position on fiction, we should be wise as to the temptations that may accompany it.