How to read now Essays

Elaine Castillo

Book - 2022

"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 P...ico. 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."--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

814.6/Castillo
2 / 2 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 814.6/Castillo Checked In
2nd Floor 814.6/Castillo Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
[New York] : Viking [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Elaine Castillo (author)
Physical Description
340 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-340).
ISBN
9780593489635
  • Author's note, or a Virgo clarifies things
  • How to read now
  • Reading teaches us empathy, and other fictions
  • Honor the treaty
  • The limits of white fantasy
  • Main character syndrome
  • "Reality is all we have to love"
  • Autobiography in Asian film, or what we talk about when we talk about representation
  • The children of Polyphemus.
Review by Booklist Review

ldquo;The way we read now is simply not good enough," declares Castillo, and there is nothing simple about the case she makes in her provocative, deeply analytical, and powerfully expressed essays. Drawing on her experiences as the Filipinx author of the novel America is Not the Heart (2018), Castillo takes a fresh and rigorous approach not only to how we read books but how we read the world. Picking up on Toni Morrison's groundbreaking work, Playing in the Dark (1992), Castillo exposes how we are "overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity," and how the claim that reading engenders empathy can be superficial and self-serving. She eviscerates the expectations that books by writers of color will depict trauma and "teach" white readers. A deftly surgical critic, Castillo dissects the biases intrinsic to the works of Joan Didion and Nobel laureate Peter Handke, and, in a particularly affecting turn, illuminates the "unexpected reader," the BIPOC reader encountering books antithetical to their very existence. Casting her net ever wider, she examines insidious legacies of colonialism in various forms of storytelling, including corporate lies about the climate crisis as it hits BIPOC communities the hardest. From reading Jane Austen to the fear and hatred fueling book challenges, Castillo's investigations are incisive, reorienting, sometimes funny, and truly revolutionary.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Castillo (America Is Not the Heart) argues in this brilliant and passionate collection that the publishing industry is designed to suit white readers and that changing the way one reads can change the way one sees the world. In "Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions," she warns against seeing stories by writers of color as a "kind of ethical protein shake" to teach white readers how to be better people, and urges that "we have to push back against the idea that engaging with our art in ways that look beyond the aesthetic is a cheapening of our engagement." In "The Limits of White Fantasy," Castillo critiques white authors' appropriation of narratives about oppression, including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which was partly "inspired" by dissidents in the Philippines during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Meanwhile, "Main Character Syndrome" takes Joan Didion to task for her novel Democracy, in which, Castillo writes, Hawaiian and Southeast Asian settings and characters exist as a background against which the white main characters act out the central drama. Castillo's knowledge, along with her firebrand style and generous humor, result in a dynamic and necessary look at the state of storytelling. This one packs a powerful punch. Agent: Emma Patterson, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. An excellent collection of essays about important subjects too often glossed over. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author's Note, or A Virgo Clarifies Things In the years since my debut novel came out, I've been thinking a lot about how to read. Not about how to write-I wouldn't trust a book about how to write by a debut novelist, any more than I would trust a book about how to swim by someone who'd accomplished the exceptional achievement of not having drowned, once. But reading? Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person. And in the post debut years of touring, and traveling-in hotel rooms in Auckland and East Lansing, on festival stages in Manila and Rome, in bookstores in London, and in the renovated community library of my hometown, Milpitas-a thought came back to me, again and again; a ghost with unfinished business, a song I couldn't get out of my head: we need to change how we read. The we I'm talking about here is generally American, since that's the particular cosmic sports team I've found myself on, through the mysteries of fate and colonial genocide-but in truth, it's a more capacious we than that, too. A we of the reading world, perhaps. By readers I don't just mean the literate, a community I don't particularly issue from myself, although I am, in spite of everything, among its fiercest spear-bearers. I mean something more expansive and yet more humble: the we that is in the world, and thinks about it, and then lives in it. That's the kind of reader I am, and love-and that's the reading practice I'm most interested in, and most alive to myself. The second thought that has come to my house and still won't grab its coat and leave is this: the way we read now is simply not good enough, and it is failing not only our writers-especially, but not limited to, our most marginalized writers-but failing our readers, which is to say, ourselves. When I talk about reading, I don't just mean books, though of course as a writer, books remain kin to me in ways that other art forms-even ones I may have come to love with an easier enthusiasm, in recent years-aren't. At heart, reading has never just been the province of books, or the literate. Reading doesn't bring us to books; or at least, that's not the trajectory that really matters. Sure, some of us are made readers-usually because of the gift (and privilege) of a literate parent, a friendly librarian, a caring kindergarten teacher-and as readers, we then come to discover the world of books. But the point of reading is not to fetishize books, however alluring they might look on an Instagram flat lay. Books, as world-encompassing as they are, aren't the destination; they're a waypoint. Reading doesn't bring us to books-books bring us to reading. They're one of the places we go to help us to become readers in the world. I know that growing up, film and TV were as important to my formation as a critical thinker-to the ways in which I engaged with "representation" in any real sense-so I can't imagine not writing about them, even in a book supposedly about reading. When I talk about how to read now, I'm not just talking about how to read books now; I'm talking about how to read our world now. How to read films, TV shows, our history, each other. How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we've inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen. How to understand that it's meaningful when Wes Anderson's characters throw Filipinx bodies off an onscreen boat like they're nothing; how to understand that bearing witness to that scene means nothing if we can't read it-if we don't have the tools to understand its context, meaning, and effect in the world. That it's meaningful to have seen HBO's Watchmen and been moved and challenged by its subversive reckoning with the kinds of superhero tropes many kids, including myself, grew up on. Books will always have a certain historical pride of place in my life-but it's also because of books that reading can have a more expansive meaning in that life, both practically and politically. In a more personal sense, as a first-generation American from a working-class / fragilely middle-class upbringing, most of the people in my life simply don't read: aren't sufficiently confident in their English, or don't have the leisure time, or have long found books and reading culture intimidating and foreclosed to them (for all my love of independent bookstores, I've also been glared at like a potential shoplifter in enough of the white-owned ones to temper that love). I don't want a book called How to Read Now to speak only to the type of people who read books and attend literary festivals-and in the same vein, I don't want it to let off the hook people who think they don't read at all. I can't write a book about reading that tells people there's only one type of reading that counts-but equally, just because you don't read books at all doesn't mean you're not reading, or being read in the world. Of course, How to Read Now runs off the tongue a little easier than How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus. I've been an inveterate reader all my life, and yet I'm writing this book at the time in my life when I have the least faith I've ever had in books, or indeed reading culture in general. (The fact that this sentiment coincides with having become a published author doesn't escape me.) For my sins, I haven't lost faith in the capacity of books to save us, remake us, take us by the scruff and show us who we were, who we are, and who we might become; that conviction has been unkillable in me for too long. But I have in some crucial way lost my faith in our capacity to truly be commensurate to the work that reading asks of us; in our ability to make our reading culture live up to the world we're reading in-and for. When I first began writing this book, I was in Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand, as a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival. Much happened in between those stolen, heady moments of writing on hotel room couches in the spring of 2019 and the (not quite) postpandemic world we now find ourselves in-worrying about the nurses in my family still working on the front lines; supporting loved ones who'd lost their jobs; mourning loved ones who'd lost their lives; joining the many marches here in the Bay to protest the anti-Black police brutality that took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, among so many others, as well as the rise in anti-Asian hate, fueled by Trump's virulently racist coronavirus rhetoric. I'd also rolled into lockdown after already being essentially confined at home in convalescence for over two months: in December 2019, just before Christmas, I'd been hospitalized for emergency surgery due to the internal hemorrhaging caused by an ectopic pregnancy, in which my left fallopian tube was surgically removed in a unilateral salpingectomy. This was my second pregnancy loss, after complications with a D&C for a miscarriage at twelve weeks left me in and out of King's College Hospital over the summer of 2017, back when I was still living in London and editing my first novel, America Is Not the Heart. All this to say, when I look back at the inception of this book, I can't help but feel that I'm looking at it from an entirely different world. In 2018 and 2019, the things I'd witnessed and experienced in the publishing industry during those early first-novel book tours and festivals made it distressingly clear to me that there was also something profoundly wrong with our reading culture, and particularly the ways in which writers of color were expected to exist in it: the roles they were meant to play, the audiences they were meant to educate and console, the problems their books were meant to solve. It started to feel like it would be impossible to continue working in this industry if I didn't somehow put down in writing the deep-seated unease I had around this framing. I wanted to write about the reading culture I was seeing: the way it instrumentalized the books of writers of color to do the work that white readers should have always been doing themselves; the way our reading culture pats itself on the back for producing "important" and "relevant" stories that often ultimately reduce communities of color to their most traumatic episodes, thus creating a dynamic in which predominantly white American readers expect books by writers of color to "teach" them specific lessons-about historical trauma, far-flung wars, their own sins-while the work of predominantly white writers gets to float, palely, in the culture, unnamed, unmarked, universal as oxygen. None of these are particularly new issues; Toni Morrison's landmark, indispensable Playing in the Dark remains the urtext on the insidious racial backbone of our reading culture. But I was occasionally alarmed during book tour events when I would make reference to Playing in the Dark, and realize that many in the audience had not read it and, indeed, seemingly hadn't ever had a substantial reckoning with the politics, especially racial politics, of their reading practices. That was then. I still believe in reading, and I still very much want to write this book; I have written it, after all. But there was the intellectual idea of writing a book called How to Read Now, in a critical attempt to contend with the racial politics and ethics of how we read our books, our history, and each other-and there was the actual lived practice of writing that book, in the midst of the historic social upheaval brought to us by a global pandemic whose grotesquely racist coverage and criminally incompetent mismanagement under Trump's America has not only utterly upended the daily lives of everyone I know, but has laid bare the outrageous truths many of us have always known, in particular regarding the true value of Black and Brown lives in this country, where systemic injustice and government neglect has meant predominantly poorer Black and Brown communities have borne the brunt of COVID-19's destruction. When I was working on this book in 2019, there were things I believed stridently about the politics of reading and writing. I know the twenty-first-century pose of literary personality in late capitalism is usually one of excoriating self-doubt and anxiety, but I am a bossy Virgo bitch, and I have generally always been irritatingly sure of myself and my convictions, occasionally to my detriment, certainly to the chagrin of those who have chosen to love me. But I would be lying if I said that the events of 2020 and 2021 hadn't profoundly affected me, and begun to permanently transform how I think about the world, and how to make art in it. I think most of all it's become clear to me that when I named the book How to Read Now, I must have subconsciously meant the title both as a bossy Virgo directive and as an inquiry: a question, open-ended. I, too, want to know how to read now. But what I thought then, and what I still think now, is this: the way we read now is, by and large, morally bankrupt and indefensible, and must change immediately, because we are indeed failing not just our writers and ourselves, but more pressingly our future-which will never look any different from our current daily feed of apocalypse if we don't figure out a different way to read the world we live in. I'll paraphrase the hackneyed quote by the equally hackneyed George Santayana (who was often a pretty piss-poor reader of the world himself, and who believed, for example, that intermarriage between superior races-his own-and inferior races-hi-should be prevented): if we don't figure out a different way to read our world, we'll be doomed to keep living in it. I don't know about you, but I find that prospect unbearable. Anyone who is perfectly comfortable with keeping the world just as it is now and reading it the way they've always read it-is, frankly, a fed, cannot be trusted, and is probably wiretapping your phone. How to Read Now White supremacy makes for terrible readers, I find. The thing is, often when people talk about racists, they talk in terms of ignorance. They're just ignorant, they say. Such ignorant people. I'm sorry, my grandpa's really ignorant. That was an ignorant thing to say. What an ignorant comment. We're besieged on all sides by the comforting logic and pathos of ignorance. It's a logic that excuses people-bad readers-from their actions; from the living effect of their bad reading. Most people are not, in fact, all that ignorant, i.e., lacking knowledge, or simply unaware. Bad reading isn't a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person, among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies, economies that say, very plainly, that cis straight white lives are inherently more valuable, interesting, and noble than the lives of everyone else; that they deserve to be set in stone, centered in every narrative. It's not a question of bringing people out of their ignorance-if only someone had told me that Filipinos were human, I wouldn't have massacred all of them!-but a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education. When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it's an education that promises that whole swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminished in meaning to you. Illegible, intangible, forever unreal as cardboard figures in a diorama. 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. 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. 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, community-destroying 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. Excerpted from How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.