A review by cubaitlubin
How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

challenging informative reflective

5.0

When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m 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’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.

Now more than ever, media literacy and critical thinking are a must. This essay collection engagingly reflects on media from the Odyssey to Cinderella to Asian cinema to monuments of slaveholders. I highlighted so many passages - not just for moments that caused me to pause and reflect, but for simply gorgeous and sharp writing. She writes very specifically to her Filipinx/MFA student/first generation Californian experience while still inviting a larger audience to be challenged by her topics. Intelligent, uncomfortable, snarky, engaging, and so very relevant. I found many connections to the ongoing work of educators to teach absented narratives (while challenging what "representation" means) and how storytelling presents a culture to its consumers. 

And the art that I truly love, the art that has saved me, never made me just feel represented. It did not speak to my vanity, my desperation to be seen positively at any cost. It made me feel—solid. It told me I was minor, and showed me my debts. It held me together. And a little like my mom, who went on to have the kid that white woman once wanted to kill: it gave me life. It brought me here. Hi.

How can we think about storytelling not just as a wholly innocent or politically neutral act, but as something that carries within it the capacity for epistemic violence and erasure, a kind of power we’re often reluctant to acknowledge when we want to unilaterally praise the moral good of reading and storytelling?