I think you’re going the long way around to say things that a lot of us would agree with if you stated them more simply. I also think that you’re making a huge assumption: that the way the author would like you to read the book is how the reader should read it. But authorial intent does not necessarily dictate reader reaction.

Whether you want to read passively or dive in critically and take notes doesn’t depend just on the book, but depends on how you’re reading, why you’re reading, and what your personal goal is.

My biggest problems with your approach:

1. So, Charlotte Perkins Gilman probably wouldn’t have written her famous feminist critique “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the form of a horror story if she didn’t want readers to have the option of enjoying it as a horror story. I read it when I was younger because Stephen King said it was the best horror short story ever written. I got the feminist aspect, I thought it just made it more horrifying. But I’ve seen it taught where the horror was ignored completely and instead all we did was look at the parallels with her life, as if it were meant to be solely autobiographical— but is that the way she wanted us to read it, to study it? Or is it ugly and reductive?

You’re assuming that the author has one right way they want you to read and derive things from the text, and that your job is to figure out what that way is and then read it appropriately— but many great writers revel in ambiguity. Is Catcher in the Rye a Buddhist parable or a tale of anomie or a cautionary story about mental illness or part of a larger oeuvre inspired by Salinger’s traumatic war experiences? Good luck! And if you work that our, Henry James is waiting for you.

2. Your elitism. You’re being snobby on behalf of writers who did not share any such exclusive attitude. Shakespeare was always scrambling to make a buck, he put the witches in Macbeth to appeal to the new king who had written a book on witchcraft. But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze them. Charles Dickens would not have looked down on the many women who read aloud from his serials in order to entertain their sisters and mothers who were spending all day doing piecework and were bored and wanted entertainment – again, it’s how he made his living. Analyze David Copperfield all you want, but look down on those readers and you miss something important about Dickens. (And the book, for that matter.)