How to Read Now

Starred review from May 9, 2022
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.

Starred review from May 15, 2022
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.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022
"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.

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