First off, reread the How to Read handout. This set of reading practices will help you enormously throughout your undergraduate, even into graduate, education. All the forms of active reading: writing back, knowing about the text including who wrote it and such, historicizing, biographizing, investigating the form, looking at words and rhetoric, voice and narrative and mood, compare it to other books.
Next, what we have been practicing in lecture all along: web active reading. Check out key terms on the web, follow up references and allusions, look for artworks and info on artists and projects. We will continue to do this in class as well.
Third, be willing to REread, many times. Don't assume any book can be understood in one reading, or that it is the author's job to make this book something easy to consume. Be realistic about how much one can understand on first reading a book, on first working with a book over several readings.
That means, don't be intimidated. Books of real importance introduce us to questions that no one has easy answers to. Think instead of being invited into the most interesting concerns that humans have had over long stretches of time. Now it's your turn to take up these issues and come to care about them, to add your bit to the range of collective human knowledge, to learn how to create knowledge, to share it, to show others how to use it, to be savvy in what you do with it yourself.
Work with the book in layers: notice what's easy and get that first. Take up the next level of difficulty or confusion and pick out the most interesting bit of it next. See what connects to that, and work out where this might take you. Add in bits and layers, reading, checking the web, talking to others, then re-reading.If it is hard and confusing, swim around in the difficulty and the chaos a bit -- without that stage of engagement as well, you cannot really believe in why all this matters.
Enjoy the spaces of non-knowing and the excitements of learning yet to happen. Have some trust, as well as willingness to be in the spaces of not-yet-knowing.
This can be an intellectual, emotional, spiritual and political experience of importance. Check it out.
