]I hadn't seriously thought that Henry misreads novels--you mean while he can discern the sensational, he doesn't recognize the core human values in novels so never applies what he reads ?

Maybe? I don't know; I haven't made up my mind about Henry as a reader yet. If I were writing a story about reading and readers, I'd set up the characters as different examples, and he'd be the character who errs in the opposite direction from the heroine. Very tidy; they'd balance each other out :) But if I look at the characters just as people, not literary devices, I see Henry as a smart guy, a shrewd observer of human nature -- how can he watch his father's treatment of Eleanor and not notice the parallels? So I don't know what to think about Henry.