Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world's emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of "emergent reading," a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world.