How to Read Now

'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
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.

Named one of '30 of the planet's most exciting young people' by the
Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel
America Is Not the Heart was named one of the best books of 2018 by
NPR,
San Francisco Chronicle,
The New York Public Library,
The New York Post,
The Boston Globe,
Real Simple,
Lit Hub, and has been nominated for the Elle Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, the Aspen Words Prize, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Book Award, and the California Book Award.