Books Promiscuously Read by Heather Cass White

Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life
By Heather Cass White
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Heather Cass White’s slim but powerful new book about the bookish life, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, examines books and reading, but unlike many other such volumes in any given publishing season, there’s nothing misty-eyed or dreamy-weamy about White’s approach. She’s every bit as ready to write about the healing, uniting power of reading, but her pages aren’t populated with wistful vicars and earnest librarians with tiny apartments crammed with books. Instead, she’s far more likely to go on about Frederick Douglass, or Prometheus giving fire to humanity, or Frankenstein’s Creature … or even Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, toiling to help her pendant husband in his exploration of all the books that don’t move him in the least. For so short a book, this is a surprisingly sweeping look at books and reading, but it’s a very different one from the norm: by stressing “the discovery, assertion, and protection of freedom that lies at reading’s core,” White is emphasizing that reading’s core is molten. 

It’s an odd thing, for a book about the joys of reading to be such a fierce thing. On almost every page, usually through the method of her thrilling interpretations of dozens of literary works, White explores what she calls “the paradox at the heart of reading,” which she characterizes in oddly anthemic terms. “The more absorbing we find - the keener and less replicable elsewhere its joys are for us,” she writes, “the deeper becomes our sense that we read to get somewhere new, a place where books themselves might be unnecessary.” 

It’s extremely doubtful that many - or any - readers are reading books with the ultimate aim of never reading books again, but there’s a real resonance to White’s claim that reading asserts the existence of our inner selves. “We read to enter a place that is unpoliced and private, to step away from boundaries as we usually experience them,” she writes. “In this way, reading is a form of self-claiming.” 

And if that project of self-claiming strikes some of White’s readers are jarringly mission-oriented for so delightful an experience as reading, well, in a sense they’ve got a point, and White is way ahead of them. She takes a bit of issue with the lifelong reader’s typical characterization of reading as the quick-sap pleasure running underneath the tough bark of their quotidian lives. Those readers might spend all day at an unfulfilling job or at fulfilling but exhausting child-rearing, but they smile inwardly at the thought of the precious reading they’ll do before bed that night. White targets that nighttime reading for a pointed aside that is, like all the rest of this book, both cautionary and uplifting:

We should move a step beyond our preoccupation with dissipation and luxury where reading is concerned. The price is too high - it makes us read less. Even the pleasant aura of nocturnal dalliance we get for carving our life into daytime reading duty and nighttime reading, however attractively naughty it makes reading seem, is a distraction from the challenge of bringing our reading into the daylight. In the daylight we can affirm it, even and perhaps especially if only to ourselves, as a mode of living. 

“We also serve who sit and read,” she writes, and of course this is correct. And some of that reading should be Books Promiscuously Read, a call to arms issued to people who thought all was quiet on the reading front.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.