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Let me direct our attention to Roland Barthes... who's been hanging out, spying, presiding, from the top right hand corner of this page all along.  The quoted text of his, S/Z, speaks precisely to this point you make about really engaged reading not coming "naturally."  In S/Z, Barthes reads Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," and in writing his experience of that reading, he reveals the tremendous amount of effort that goes into making sense of our encounters with literary texts.  Even when it feels like we're just easily being carried along by a narrative, Barthes shows that what we're doing involves a whole complex choreography using many different "codes" (semiotic, thematic...) we have to interpret at once.  With any text, the onus is really on us, the readers, because the system is an open one... we determine what goes in and what comes out as much as does Balzac. 

I haven't had the pleasure of working my way through a glut of assigned biochemistry articles, and I'm fairly certain I never will.  But I imagine what's being reacted negatively to here is the data-drivenness of the writing, the absence of ambiguity, of a way in, a point of entry for readers.  Being treated like a computer responsible for downloading information is dehumanizing, and when we aren't feeling particularly human, we can't be particularly good readers, because it's all this subjective, idiosyncratic, human stuff that gives our consciousness its unique contours, its texture, a surface that can get some traction when put into contact with the texture of the writing. 

Questions I hope can be addressed by the end of the semester...

-Related to "If there is no Truth, what do we teach our kids?"  What do we do about data?  It's not the same, but I think it's related to the "basics" we all seem to agree very young school children need to suck it up and master before they can move on to all this questioning Knowledge stuff. 

-We should think about how we are writing for our readers, what responsibility exists there, because it seems like the biggest problem is fear. Your biochemistry reading is (I hypothesize based on no empirical knowledge) unpleasant because it doesn't take the form of an invitation, but rather throws down a gauntlet.  You are charged with absorbing a good deal of highly technical information.  The message is that if you don't manage mastery, manage to learn the foreign language quick, you've failed.  And a situation where failure is a looming possibility is always anxiety-producing.  I think this anxiety inhibits the "natural" curiousity that might be there, and makes it very difficult to be a good reader.