I love this. This is how I hope I’m helping my students read.
“But good books demand our attention, great ones our full capacities. Any good book elicits the reader’s pleased compliance, but great ones move the whole soul. Drawn in, I follow where the mind of the author leads. If I’m reading well, I notice patterns and repetitions, I take metaphors seriously, I connect one passage with another. I underline, scribble on any available white space, and flip back through pages to find earlier passages when I sense a relation between parts of the narrative or argument. Reading is the action of holding complex things in mind, recalling previous details and anticipating new ones in the weave of meanings.”