Feb 28

Feb 28 How to Read Now: Essays

About the book

Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Viking

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My Review

How to Read Now has been on my TBR since it was published in 2022. This year, I’ve been on a mission to sharpen my critical reading skills, so I finally picked it up. Alas, this book is not what I had naively expected — my brain ignored the “essays” part of the title in favor of the “how to” part — but it is, without a doubt, excellent.

Written with more than a dash of spunk, personality, and sarcasm, How to Read Now is a collection of whip-smart essays on the current state of the politics of reading. Castillo draws from a lifetime of deep, wide, critical reading to call out all the BS: the impossibility of nonpolitical art, the empty allyship of “reading for empathy,” the false promises of the publishing industry’s box-checking, the hypocrisy of calls to “separate the art from the artist” for white authors while BIPOC authors cannot have their work evaluated separately from their identities, and so much more.

What will stick with me longest, I think, is Castillo’s construction of the “unexpected reader,” ie the person an author never would have or could have expected to read their work. For example, Hemingway never would have expected someone like, say, a Black trans woman from New York City. However, white readers have never lived in a world where they were not the expected readers of literally everything. And so when they find themselves to be the unexpected reader, they criticize (or vilify) the author for it.

I can’t wait to inhale whatever Castillo puts out next.