We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.
How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
Real reading is a lonely activity.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.