Books Promiscuously Read
Reading as a Way of Life
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
The critic and scholar Heather Cass White offers an exploration of the nature of reading
Heather Cass White’s Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Read illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it.
Through three sections—Play, Transgression, and Insight—which focus on three ways of thinking about reading, Books Promiscuously Read moves among and considers many poems, novels, stories, and works of nonfiction. The prose is shot through with quotations reflecting the way readers think through the words of others.
Books Promiscuously Read is a tribute to the whole lives readers live in their books, and aims to recommit people to those lives. As White writes, “What matters is staying attuned to an ordinary, unflashy, mutely persistent miracle; that all the books to be read, and all the selves to be because we have read them, are still there, still waiting, still undiminished in their power. It is an astonishing joy.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
White, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, theorizes in her discerning debut that reading without any particular aim is the surest way to achieve imaginative freedom. "Our reading is best when it is promiscuous," she writes, and urges that reading should "drift all over the place" as books do. The core of White's argument unfolds over three chapters that cover the fundamentals of reading promiscuously. In "Play," White asserts that reading is a game that can deliver a "perennial surprise," which becomes "the most joyful part." "Transgression" is an analysis of reading as an act of rebellion and defiance: "To read is to step outside the carefully patrolled boundaries of one's assigned sphere." "Insight" offers a look at reading as soul-work, in which readers can move between the worlds of the page, other experiences, and back to reality. Along the way, she offers close readings of Walt Whitman (on the self and other) and Jane Austen (on "social skirmishes"), among others. White's prose style tends toward the academic, and given the sometimes abstract subject matter, can be difficult follow. Such density, however, doesn't conceal White's triumphant conviction that reading should stay "wild." Literary-minded readers will appreciate this fresh approach.
