This article highlights a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading (CSVR), a complex reader model illuminated by vivid findings from an eight-year collaborative classroom-based study and extensive reviews of cognitive and sociocultural research. Within the CSVR, reading is conceptualized as being shaped by a readers' culturally and linguistically situated knowledge (ways of knowing), experiences and relationships (ways of being), and cognitive reading processes (ways of reading) which overlap and interact through the non-linear, active process of culturally mediated cognition. In extending the CSVR, the authors hope to supplant long- standing false dichotomies between the cognitive and sociocultural functions within the human experience of reading. In doing so, we hope to advance ideas about how learning to read can foster cultural sustenance--with children and their lifeways centered as full and complete.