William Deresiewicz:

Deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them. The afternoon the students arrived, I handed out a sheet with some orienting material. At the top, I put two quotations. The first was from David Neidorf, the former longtime president of Deep Springs College: “To read a book truly is to cooperate with its effort to teach you something.” The second was from Ursula K. Le Guin: “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” Says it, that is, like all art, through form, which it is the purpose of close reading to expound.