"[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." –
Vivian Gornick, author of
Unfinished Business "One of the pleasures of reading is the branching-and-branching-and-branching of texts, the way the books you've read form an underground network of intentional and unintentional references to each other . . .
Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read describes this joy–and all the joys of reading–as efficiently as I've ever seen anyone do. It is a book that I would give someone who has just got bitten by the reading bug and doesn't quite understand yet what's happened." –Phil Christman,
Ploughshares "
Books Promiscuously Read sets a high standard for what might become an exciting new genre of literary criticism for educated general readers . . .
It rings true." –Allen Michie,
Arts Fuse "'
People who like to read should do more of it, ' writes Heather Cass White. People who like to read should read more of Heather Cass White. Buoyant, precise, speculative, astute, intermittently wild, this book is proved on the pulse. Somewhere between commonplace book and brilliant guide for the perplexed, between apologia and
essai, White's work shimmers: aphoristic, inviting, provocative. Proposing reading "as a mode of living" and "a species of dreaming," White salutes the perfectly useless jouissance of readerly absorption; en route she offers fleet, searching, illuminating readings (of Cervantes, George Eliot, Thylias Moss, inter alia).
This is seriously deep play." –
Maureen N. McLane, author of
More Anon "
Discerning . . . Literary-minded readers will appreciate this fresh approach." –
Publishers Weekly
