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."
"[Books Promiscuously Read] was so engrossing that I couldn't put it down, and I think that was actually the point. This is somebody who really just wants to encourage you to enjoy the time that you spend reading . . . This is a book that tells you that your guilty pleasure is actually not guilty."
Tess Taylor, NPR
"To metacognitively read about the reading process, to double back onto one's own track, to sniff the air for one's own scent, can be a heady experience. Cass White grounds us expertly. Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life is a delight to read primarily because it eschews the easy commonplaces of the why you should read genre in order to get at the core of the experience itself."
Ryan Asmussen, Chicago Review of Books
"An elegantly constructed meditation on the vital relation between reading and the everyday self, Books Promiscuously Read animates the experience with wit, brilliance, and affection. A pleasure to read and pass on."
