newbie: read, load and eval

[dale]

This seems like the simplest thing which guile ought to be able to do
in a snap, but I can't for the life of me work out how to do it.

I have a file called a.data which contains some data as a scheme
expression, such as

'("This" "is" "a" "test")

and I want to use these data in a program, so I want to write a line
like

(display (load "a.data"))

but it doesn't work; nor does

(with-input-from-file "a.data" (lambda () (display (read))))


What is the way to do this?