{"id":49700,"date":"2022-07-27T11:12:33","date_gmt":"2022-07-27T15:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/?p=49700"},"modified":"2022-07-27T10:23:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T14:23:52","slug":"how-to-read-now-essays-by-elaine-castillo-in-christian-science-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/how-to-read-now-essays-by-elaine-castillo-in-christian-science-monitor\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo [in Christian Science Monitor]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo<\/strong><\/p>\n

Provocative and pointed literary criticism in How to Read Now: Essays<\/em> challenges people to become better, smarter readers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo\u2019s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now<\/em>, an incandescent collection of essays that provokes and discomfits, but ultimately engages, edifies, and thoroughly entertains. \u201cOf course, How to Read Now<\/em> runs off the tongue a little easier than How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus<\/em>,\u201d she writes, but that\u2019s exactly what can make people better, stronger, smarter readers.<\/p>\n

Castillo\u2019s 2018 debut novel, America Is Not the Heart<\/em> \u2013 both a nod and challenge to Carlos Bulosan\u2019s classic, America Is in the Heart<\/em> \u2013 was critically lauded, nominated for significant awards, best-of listed, and earned her the designation of being one of Financial Times<\/em>\u2019 \u201c30 of the planet\u2019s most exciting young people<\/a>.\u201d The shrewd insights she wove into her fiction \u2013 about identity, inequity, immigration, politics \u2013 rise brilliantly to the surface here, shining with piercing truth, bolstered with significant research (20 annotated pages of works cited), and tempered with surprising humor.<\/p>\n

Castillo, whose father was a security guard and her mother a nurse originally from the Philippines, was raised in Milpitas, California, in the 1980s and \u201990s \u2013 then a town of mostly Filipino, Vietnamese, and Mexican working-class immigrant families. Castillo credits her father with making her \u201can inveterate reader all [her] life.\u201d By middle school, she was reading Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em>, \u201ca fact that none of my white teachers believed, and in fact actively and aggressively tried to disprove \u2013 another lesson familiar to many kids of color I know.\u201d With her father as guide, she continued to defy expectations \u201cto read across borders, and to read in translation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be an \u201cunexpected reader,\u201d she insists, \u201chas turned out to be the most valuable gift of my intellectual life.\u201d The unexpected reader, she explains, \u201cis someone who was not remotely imagined \u2013 maybe not even imaginable \u2013 by the creator of that artwork or anyone in its scope.\u201d By being that unexpected reader, Castillo can point out the careless violence, misogyny, and racism in controversial Nobel Prize-winning writer Peter Handke\u2019s novel Across<\/em>. She can recognize beloved Jane Austen characters as \u201centwined with Britain\u2019s empire and slave economy.\u201d She critiques the author of the bestselling novel American Dirt<\/em> as \u201ca white woman monetizing border trauma to hawk at predominantly white suburban readers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each of her essays has indelible lessons to explore and absorb. The titular \u201cHow to Read Now\u201d begins with \u201cWhite supremacy makes for terrible readers,\u201d confronting the detrimental effects of assumptions that center the experiences and viewpoints of white people. Reading, she also reminds us, doesn\u2019t happen only on the page: \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cReading Teaches Empathy, and Other Fictions\u201d \u2013 arguably the strongest among an already essential collection \u2013 Castillo challenges the well-intentioned platitude \u201cthat reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human.\u201d Her reaction is blunt: such a superficial attitude diminishes writers of color into \u201clittle more than ethnographers,\u201d the reading experience akin to \u201ca quick zoo visit.\u201d \u201cThe result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific \u2013 and go to white writers to feel the universal.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a collection of essays to race through; instead, it should be read thoughtfully and with an open mind to encourage fresh understanding. Castillo refers to Toni Morrison\u2019s Playing in the Dark<\/em>, published in 1992, as the \u201curtext on the insidious racial backbone of our reading culture\u201d and yet she was alarmed to learn how few people had read it when she referenced the work on her book tour. Three decades later, pairing Playing in the Dark<\/em> with How to Read Now<\/em> seems a foolproof means to becoming better readers.<\/p>\n

Review<\/strong>: “Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo,”\u00a0Christian Science Monitor<\/em>, July 26, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo Provocative and pointed literary criticism in How to Read Now: Essays challenges people to become better, smarter readers. Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo\u2019s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now, an incandescent collection…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1326,20,6535],"tags":[89,6608,148,341,8453,24,10433,51,25,39,29,364],"class_list":["post-49700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-filipinao-american","category-nonfiction","category-repost","tag-anthology-collection","tag-bookdragon","tag-christian-science-monitor","tag-colonialism","tag-elaine-castillo","tag-historical","tag-how-to-read-now","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-race-racism","tag-sociology"],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo [in Christian Science Monitor] - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/how-to-read-now-essays-by-elaine-castillo-in-christian-science-monitor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo [in Christian Science Monitor] - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo Provocative and pointed literary criticism in How to Read Now: Essays challenges people to become better, smarter readers. 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