So I was reading a text for my tomorrow's "Introduction to Literature" lecture by Vladimir Nabokov and it's so good, I just want to share an extract from it with everybody, regarding reading a piece of work, which could also be a fanfic:

We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.