Dear Reader
Welcome to your first week of onboarding. Here, we begin with the essential—the art of reading well. However accomplished or curious you may already be, reading well is not a static skill but an ongoing practice: a cultivated attentiveness, a refinement of taste, and a deepened sensitivity to language, form, and meaning. Over the next few weeks, we’ll introduce ideas, thinkers, and frameworks designed to sharpen your perception, expand your intellectual repertoire, and remind you that literature, at its best, is not merely consumed—it is inhabited, interrogated, and allowed to alter us.
How to Read Well
Week 1
In Week 1 of your onboarding, we’re laying the intellectual foundation for everything to come: how to read well, and why reading matters—not as a pastime, but as a practice that sharpens the mind, refines the senses, and deepens your interior life.
We begin with Harold Bloom’s insistence that reading, at its core, is about aesthetic pleasure—the private, often wordless exhilaration that occurs when you encounter beauty, complexity, and imaginative power on the page. This is not a call to passivity or escapism, but to engagement: to allow literature to move you, to stretch you, to unsettle and delight you all at once. Barthes takes us further with The Pleasure of the Text, reminding us that reading is not merely decoding meaning, but submitting to the sensory, rhythmic, often erotic textures of language itself. In this way, reading becomes an act of presence—a heightened attunement to beauty, to ambiguity, to the subtle structures of thought and sensation.
We also introduce the spiritual—or rather, the meaningful—dimensions of reading through thinkers like George Steiner (Real Presences) and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), both of whom insist that language and art are not hollow forms, but living materials that gesture toward transcendence, coherence, and interiority. Reading well is not about deciphering symbols in a vacuum; it’s about participating in an ongoing dialogue with human experience itself.
Literature doesn’t happen in isolation, and neither does meaning. Through intersubjectivity and intertextuality—the shared, layered ways texts and people speak to one another—we come to see that reading is a profoundly social, even communal, act. Reader Response Theory and Affect Theory remind us that how a book lands depends not only on its construction, but on your attention, your experiences, your embodied reactions. To read is to step into a web of meaning-making that unfolds between text, self, and world.
Finally, we touch on existential phenomenological anthropology and the idea of narrative consciousness—big words for an essential truth: that stories, when read well, shape how we inhabit life itself. They reveal the structures of thought, the textures of feeling, the hidden patterns of meaning that run beneath the surface of daily experience.
This week, we are not just learning how to read literature—we are beginning to see that reading is one of the few reliable paths to beauty, depth, and the quiet, ongoing work of becoming.
Reading Assignment
Highly Encouraged
Glossary
Aesthetic Pleasure
The deep, often private satisfaction derived from encountering beauty, complexity, or imaginative power in a work of art or literature. Harold Bloom insists this is the foundational reason we read—to experience that elusive, interior thrill that language, when used well, uniquely offer.
Aesthetic Risk
The inevitable vulnerability one accepts when engaging with ambitious art or literature. To read or create with seriousness is to risk misunderstanding, discomfort, or failure—but also to open oneself to revelation and beauty.
Affect
A pre-conscious, sensory, often non-verbal intensity that shapes our emotional and bodily experience. In reading, affect refers to how a text moves us—not just through plot or argument, but through tone, atmosphere, rhythm, and the small, often indescribable sensations literature evokes.
Works Referenced
Suggested Titles