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74
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
80/100Scholars
88/100Author:
Elaine Castillo
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
July 26, 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. 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called 'Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.' The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it.
... 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.
Elaine Castillo dismantles the notion that art should be separate from the artist, because our understanding of where a story comes from, and who is telling it, matters.
... bracing.
