"This book offers a lively, unusual, and highly intelligent set of comments on the pleasures of reading - which are in Davidson's view not quite the joys or benefits of close reading in the received academic sense, but are definitely those of reading closely, paying precise attention to details of style, and reflecting on the mixture of meaning and delight such details give to anyone who cares about them." - Michael Wood, Princeton University

'This book restores the priority of the sentence to literary-critical reading. It seeks to elevate the sentence as a unit of reading, in order to return us to an immediate attachment to the feeling of literary prose – and the forms of thinking done in prose, and the techniques of art that make up prose as brushstrokes and pigments do painting." - Mark Greif, The New School

"Jenny Davidson is the ideal reader every writer wishes for, who catches every nuance and every sly allusion, who is alive to rhythm and color and orchestration. She does not just read for that ostensibly load-bearing stuff that is labeled "meaning," but detects all the layers of meaning that are conveyed purely by style. Her book is a gift and a deep pleasure, because what makes her such a virtuoso reader is that she's also a first-rate writer." - Luc Sante, Author of Low Life