Critical reading is in crisis, it is said. It has run out of steam (Latour 2004), become formulaic (Hayles 2012), and it “singularly fails to surprise” (Felski 2009). This diagnosis can and should be questioned. What is really at stake in the current struggle over the reading practices of literary studies? Can the capital associated with critical reading be converted into another currency – and what might that currency be? The recent calls for surface reading (Best & Marcus 2009) and a new formalism undoubtedly forces adherents of symptomatic reading to revisit and revise some of their central presuppositions. What seems to be forgotten, however, is the lingering proximity of the critique of critical reading to the object of its critique. Some of the hidden foundations of critical reading are very much alive in the critique of it as well. In both fields the reading experience itself is paradoxically invisible. In my paper I will confront the reading practices of literary studies with what I, with a term borrowed from Italo Calvino, call reading around the text. This concept forces us to take the reading experience itself, and the social framing of it, serious. It can concern the concrete physical (or virtual) place of reading, the text as a material object, other actors, activities and artifacts that become important in the reading experience. Is it possible to re-imagine a form of critical reading that is sensitive to and curious about these issues?