num_pages: 176
description: The critic and scholar Heather Cass White offers an exploration of the nature of readingHeather Cass Whites 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 sectionsPlay Transgression and Insightwhich 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.
language: English
title: Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux