Funny smart brilliant . . . a tour de force' Kasim Ali author of Good Intentions 'Insanely
erudite and absolutely necessary for our times' Gina Apostol author of Gun Dealer's Daughter
'Energetically brilliant warmly humane incisively funny' Andrew Sean Greer Pulitzer Prize
-winning author of Less 'I gasped shouted and holler-laughed . . . Phenomenal' R.O. Kwon
author of The Incendiaries 'A wake-up call. A broadside. A rich and brilliant war cry' Chris
Power author of A Lonely Man 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.
