Author: Elaine Castillo
How To Read Now is an interesting collection of essays about reading books, reading films, reading art and reading the world in a way that makes us better humans.
This is a book on readership that is itself a series of readings.
“Despite its searching quality, How to Read Now approaches reading as a political act that implicates everyone,” Jane Hu said in a review for The New York Times.
To be a good reader, Castillo suggests, means being open to the different readings of other people, perhaps especially those you disagree with.
“None of this work is meant to be done alone,” she writes.
“Critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color.”
Despite its declarative title, “How to Read Now” is not so much an instruction manual as an earnest invitation — “a question, open-ended,” she writes. “I, too, want to know how to read now.”
America Is Not the Heart is Castillo’s first novel.
She is a graduate of the University of California – Berkeley.
