Some people have that erroneous notion that read is the command to read a line. It's NOT.
read reads words from a (possibly backslash-continued) line, where words are $IFS delimited and backslash can be used to escape the delimiters (or continue lines).

The generic syntax is:
read word1 word2... remaining_words

#!/bin/sh
IFS=','
read this that
printf "$that"		#that is a pen

pluto@Oregon % sh ./test.sh
'this is a test', 'that is a pen'

$ read a b c
        foo bar\ baz   bl\ah   blah\
whatever whatever

$ printf "$a\n"		#foo
$ printf "$b\n"		#bar baz
$ printf "$c\n"		#blah   blahwhatever whatever

$read -r a b c		#note: \ does NOT have any function now, so whatever whatever cannot be included
$ printf "$a"		#foo
$ printf "$b"		#bar\
$ printf "$c"		#baz     blh     blah\