****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
It is, as the title allows, several books - a literary essay, a manifesto, a confession, a memoir, a commonplace book, a moral argument... Each is wonderful!I experienced it as a sublime day hanging out with a serious, funny, insightful reader and her writer friends - a conversation led by the author's graceful, incisive, wise, unpretentious, and open mind. The book says so much in the words of the books themselves (the decision not to provide citations in the text is exactly right). My own sparse mental shelves were rattling: "So this is what it would be like to think in a more fully stocked mind" It is a tribute to the prose that the author's words never felt like a fall from grace next to the quotes from the great books she quotes. In this stance of "asking vital questions in the company of others" the author holds her own among the masters.The things the book has to say about reading are insightful and useful. It's a topic people have never stopped talking and writing about, but White has original things to say. The book does such a good job of describing, and finding the importance in, the lived experience of reading. Play, Transgression, Insight are so much more useful than the way literary theory has talked about what reading is.The book brings back the sublime of reading well, delivers the playful scolding one deserves for not reading enough, and inspires one to try to be better. "One can read to another person but not for him" is one such gentle admonition.The book says so much, so concisely, and there is an apt humility to keeping it short - the volume seems to be saying "I'll be brief, so you can get back to reading poems and novels." Yet it wants to be read more than once - it is quite philosophical and moral. It wears those garments casually.The "...forget who you are" at the very end is the mic drop rebuttal to the identity politics of our times.It had its intended result. After reading this, I bought a few more books I've been meaning to read.
