A brief note is not enough space to do more than begin to list the many eye-opening arguments in University of Michigan professor Megan Sweeney's study of women's reading practices in three prisons in Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. (Sweeney also contacted prisons in Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York, but she was denied access.)Three core chapters address incarcerated women's experiences reading urban fiction, self-help books (including Christian self-help), and books that explicitly engage themes of victimization. But equally distinguished are the framing chapters. Sweeney's 35-page overview of the place of reading in the history of the American penal system—the efforts of black middle-class women to get books to black prisoners; the collaboration between prison professionals and librarians to shape prisoners' reading experiences; the notion of reading as an act that could reform prisoners—is riveting. Also absorbing is Sweeney's discussion of "material dimensions of reading." In that chapter, she vividly re-creates the constrained circumstances in which women read: cramped prison libraries, policed by prison officials who fear the libraries serve as social outlets and pick-up spots instead of as places where "real readers" go to get books.

The selection of books available in any given prison varies according to a number of factors, including the librarians' particular proclivities and prison policies on banning books (the prisons Sweeney studied banned books on topics ranging from magic to gay sex). Sectarian titles—often donated—can be found in chaplains' offices. Evangelical Christians tend to donate books in higher numbers than other religious groups (Joyce Meyer has been an especially enthusiastic about getting her books to prisons), so much so that at least one federal appeals court has found that "some opportunities, privileges, and reading materials are available only to prisoners who are willing to embrace a Christian perspective." Yet for all the factors limiting the titles from which prisoners can choose, books prove central to the lives of many incarcerated women. Crawling into a book is a way of creating privacy in crowded prisons where one does not have "a room of one's own." In a daily routine structured by the regimented prison calendar, reading allows women to shape their experience of time, slipping into the timelessness of a good novel. Women also use the books pragmatically. Numerous women, for example, feel overwhelmed by technical law books but gain information about judges, court-appointed lawyers, and juries from reading John Grisham. Finally, books have an important sensory function. In the uncomfortable, noisy, sterile prison environment, "in a space that offers few sanctioned opportunities for soothing human touch … the tactile and aesthetic properties of books can assume added significance." One woman speaks of her appreciation for book's "pretty" appearance and their "fresh" smell—visual beauty and olfactory pleasure being in short supply in her prison.

Reading Is My Window is not just a stellar example of the history and ethnography of reading—though it is that. It is also a point of entry into a world with which many Americans have no direct contact. Throughout, Sweeney never lets the reader lose sight of how the U.S. prison system allows us, as a society, to lock "up the human evidence of our social failures" and evade "the profound social problems that fuel crime in the first place." In particular, Sweeney takes aim at the Supreme Court's holding (in the 2006 decision Beard v. Banks) that prisons can deny reading as a form of rehabilitation. In short, this book represents terrifically important scholarship and compelling, passionate activism, and it deserves a wide readership among people who care about books, and people who care about racism, political economy, justice, social change, and citizenship in the United States. I'm going to start by sending copies of Reading Is My Window to the list of organizations that gather books for prisoners included in Sweeney's appendix.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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