While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on embodiment, disability, and reading pedagogies in an analysis of popular composition textbooks, this article showcases common methods that cast reading and the reader as disembodied in instructional materials. I argue that by ignoring the materiality of reading and its instruction, we ignore the body's role in meaning making and thus limit our students' understanding of their own corporeal and situated responses to texts. This article calls attention to reading as always material and embodied and encourages composition instructors to seek out teaching methods that will help students to investigate their bodily knowledge of a text.