how to read now essays

For Elaine Castillo, Reading Is Politics

The essays in “How to Read Now” pose earnest questions about interpretation, inheritance and human understanding.

Elaine Castillo Credit... Amaal Said

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HOW TO READ NOW: Essays, by Elaine Castillo

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers,” Elaine Castillo writes in her essay collection, “How to Read Now.” The sentence, like the book’s title, is both a dig and a dare, which blooms into an urgent plea: “We need to change how we read.” For Castillo, born in California to Filipino immigrants, this “we” is “generally American”; her book is directed toward the marginalized communities that make up a large part of this country.

Castillo’s debut novel, “ America Is Not the Heart ,” depicted the everyday lives of Filipina migrant laborers (nurses, maids, sex workers) who are too rarely foregrounded in American literature. The book acknowledged its literary debt — to Carlos Bulosan’s foundational 1943 novel “America Is in the Heart,” about Filipino farmers in Depression-era California — while also expanding its relevance for contemporary readers.

“How to Read Now” is an even more explicit meditation on questions of inheritance, working through Castillo’s responsibilities not as a writer, but as a reader. Its eight chapters engage the readers who have most informed her own practice, beginning with her father: an otherwise unassuming “old Pinoy security guard at a computer chip company” who “was making me read Plato’s ‘Symposium’ when I was in middle school, a fact that none of my white teachers believed.”

This is a book on readership that is itself a series of readings. Castillo leads by example, offering exegeses on texts from Henry James to Wong Kar-wai, Jane Austen to “X-Men.” Reading, for Castillo, is hardly limited to books, encompassing popular television, a colonial treaty and a statue.

Despite its searching quality, “How to Read Now” approaches reading as a political act that implicates everyone. To be a good reader, Castillo suggests, means being open to the different readings of other people, perhaps especially those you disagree with. “None of this work is meant to be done alone,” she writes. “Critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color.” Here, Castillo reminds us that her “we” contains multitudes — a Whitmanian collective that is necessarily porous and shifting.

Castillo’s nonfiction carries the same animated verve as her novel. At times the prose veers toward the polemical, but only to unsettle our pieties: that reading teaches us empathy, that white artists, unlike artists of color, can be separated from their art and from identity politics. Instead, Castillo writes for the author’s “unexpected reader”: “someone who was not remotely imagined — maybe not even imaginable — by the creator of that artwork.”

In “Main Character Syndrome” Castillo pulls off a masterly takedown of the cult of Joan Didion, who has become “shorthand for a certain strain of bourgeois intellectual white feminism so beloved by luxury capitalism for the veneer of authenticity and depth it provides.” In “Autobiography in Asian Film,” she explains why the “representation matters” discourse around centering more Asian American characters in mainstream media will always fail to account for the true heterogeneity of Asian American experience.

Despite its declarative title, “How to Read Now” is not so much an instruction manual as an earnest invitation — “a question, open-ended,” she writes. “I, too, want to know how to read now.” What emerges is an engaging and provocative conversation with a playful interlocutor who wanted me, her reader, to talk back.

There is a breathless earnestness to Castillo’s writing, which unfurls in long sentences laced with extended parentheticals and subordinate clauses. The chatty prose and its rhetorical flourishes are distinctly millennial: “but go off”; “u ok boomer?”; “T.L.D.R.” When I started reading the book, I (another Asian American living in the Bay Area) frequently found myself in ambivalent or even direct disagreement with Castillo. It gradually became clear that that was the point: for me to become her “unexpected reader,” and thus feel the full weight of her argument. “How to Read Now” is a book that doesn’t seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up. And on this I agree with Castillo: It so desperately needs to change.

Jane Hu is a critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bookforum and elsewhere.

HOW TO READ NOW: Essays, by Elaine Castillo | 340 pp. | Viking | $26

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How to Read Now: Essays Kindle Edition

• Print length 351 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Viking
• Publication date July 26, 2022
• File size 1777 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09G9BKYBD
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking (July 26, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 26, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1777 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 351 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593489632
• #11 in Comparative Literature Literary Criticism
• #48 in Comparative Literature
• #82 in Books & Reading Literary Criticism

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HOW TO READ NOW

by Elaine Castillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2022

An excellent collection of essays about important subjects too often glossed over.

A Filipinx writer dismantles the harmful assumptions that underpin literature and the modern world.

Castillo’s idea of reading extends far beyond just books: “I’m talking about how to read our world now….How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.” In these essays, the author interrogates damaging assumptions that permeate our culture, especially pertaining to the stories and voices that receive the most attention; who those narratives serve; and who they often purposefully obscure. Castillo challenges the often espoused wisdom that we should read books by diverse authors to build empathy, noting that “we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.” She pushes back against simplified, incomplete thinking about matters of race and inequality. “The decolonial point here,” she writes, “is not to give voice to the voiceless, but to recognize the voices that have always been there—to recognize them, and to honor them.” While communities of color have always suffered the bulk of oppression, the stories about oppression that frequently garner the most attention are produced by White creators, for White audiences, featuring White people, a phenomenon Castillo deftly explores in “The Limits of White Fantasy.” Elsewhere, the author questions Joan Didion’s reputation as “the preeminent chronicler of Californian life” while Native people’s ties to California, their right to tell California’s stories, are ignored—or else they are reduced to footnotes in the stories told by people like Didion. Mere representation should not be the goal, Castillo argues, because the insistence on “positive representation” has never been for the benefit of the communities supposedly being represented. Not just thoroughly researched, these essays are also wildly engaging, with a biting and appropriately scathing tone and plenty of humor. Refreshingly, the humor never distracts from the urgency of the prose or incisiveness of the analysis.

Pub Date: July 26, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-48963-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Elaine Castillo

by Bob Woodward ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2024

An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.

Documenting perilous times.

In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024

ISBN: 9781668052273

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICAL & ROYALTY

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THE MESSAGE

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me ; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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