Reading is a complex process that involves visual and cognitive skills. It requires the reader to interpret written symbols based on their language abilities, knowledge, and cognitive skills. Reading comprehension refers to the ability to understand ideas in a text by simultaneously using skills like identifying the author's purpose and mood, determining main ideas, using context clues, and decoding meaning. Effective reading involves a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing and is influenced by a reader's language skills, view of reading as a two-way process, and use of strategies like the FIVES approach to comprehension.