Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now

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How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words — beautiful, aspirational — are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, she moves to wrest reading away from the aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico.

At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy — within ourselves, and with each other.

'I cannot say enough about How to Read Now… Check it out' Roxane Gay 'A red-hot grenade… One of my favourite books of the year' Jia Tolentino

'Energetically brilliant, warmly humane, incisively funny' Andrew Sean Greer

'I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed … Phenomenal' R.O. Kwon

'A wake-up call. A broadside. A rich and brilliant war cry' Chris Power
This book is currently unavailable
310 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2022
Publication year
2022
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Quotes

  • Eneshahas quoted3 months ago
    The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, communitydestroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.
  • Eneshahas quoted3 months ago
    White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope. This is even more apparent in the kind of reading most enthusiastically trafficked by the white liberal literary community that has such an outsize influence, intellectually and economically, on the publishing industry today.
  • Eneshahas quoted3 months ago
    They don’t know how to read us, I’ve heard fellow writer friends of color complain, usually after a particularly frustrating Q&A in which a white person has either taken offense to something in our books or in the discussion (usually the mention of whiteness at all will be enough to offend these particularly thin-skinned readers), or said something well-meaning but ultimately self-serving, usually about how their story made them feel terrible about your country
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