How to Read Now
What we choose to see
Description
There's a sentence people say about books so often that it has stopped meaning anything: reading makes you a better person. It builds empathy, opens the mind, teaches us to walk in someone else's shoes. Elaine Castillo, a novelist born in the San Francisco Bay Area to Filipino immigrant parents, opens her 2022 essay collection How to Read Now by refusing that comfort. She has heard the empathy line her whole life, usually from people who read a novel about a country they will never visit and feel, afterward, that they understand it. The feeling is real. Castillo's question is what it costs, and who pays.
Her book is not a reading guide in the usual sense. It offers no lists, no ten-books-to-fix-your-life. It is a set of sharp, personal, sometimes furious essays about the habits we bring to books, films, and culture without noticing them — the assumptions about who a reader is, whose stories count as universal, and whose count as anthropology. Castillo writes as someone who loves reading and precisely because she loves it, refuses to let it off the hook.
What makes the book bracing is its target. Castillo is not scolding people for reading the wrong things. She is asking us to notice the machinery underneath the act itself — the way a culture decides which lives are worth imagining and which are merely backdrop. Reading, in her hands, stops being a private pleasure and becomes something closer to a civic muscle we have let go slack.
The question we’re asking : What are we actually doing when we say reading makes us better, and what does that story let us avoid?What we’ll see : How one novelist takes apart the comfortable myths around reading and hands back something harder and more alive.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The empathy alibi
Castillo starts with the idea most of us have never questioned: that reading fiction about people unlike us grows our capacity for empathy. It is a lovely thought, endlessly repeated in commencement speeches and book-club marketing. It is also, she argues, an alibi. The empathy story quietly recasts the reader as the hero of the encounter. We pick up a novel set in a place we'll never go, feel moved, and close it with the warm sense that we have done a kind of moral work. The people in the book have served their purpose — they made us feel something.
She is careful here, because she is not against being moved. Her objection is to the transaction. When empathy becomes the whole point, the other person's story gets flattened into a resource for our self-improvement. Their pain becomes our lesson. Their specificity — the actual texture of a life — gets sanded down into something digestible, something that confirms what we already suspected about suffering and resilience and the human spirit. The reader stays comfortably at the center.
02Chapter 2 — Who gets to be a reader
Behind every argument about reading, Castillo notices, sits an unspoken picture of the reader. In most of the culture that shaped her, that reader was assumed to be white, educated, and standing at a comfortable distance from the material. Everyone else was assumed to be the subject, not the audience. She grew up devouring books and films that plainly did not imagine someone like her holding them — a Filipina daughter of immigrants who was, all along, quietly reading over the shoulder of the reader they had in mind.
This matters because the assumed reader shapes everything: what gets explained and what gets taken for granted, what counts as exotic and what counts as normal. When a story pauses to translate a foreign word or describe an unfamiliar meal, it reveals who it thinks is watching. Castillo reads these small choices closely, and they add up to a map of who a culture treats as the default human being and who it treats as a curiosity to be interpreted.
03Chapter 3 — Reading is never innocent
One of Castillo's firmest claims is that reading is not a neutral, private act happening safely inside our heads. It is shaped by power — by who got published, who got reviewed, who was taught in schools, who was cast, who was believed. By the time a book reaches us, dozens of decisions have already been made about whose voice deserves amplification. To read without noticing this is to mistake the end of a long, filtered process for a simple encounter between one mind and one page.
She refuses the idea that we can separate a work from its politics, or an author from what they believed and did. This is not a call to burn books or cancel the dead. It is a call to read with our eyes open — to hold the beauty of a work and its blind spots at the same time, without pretending we must choose. Castillo can admire a writer's craft while naming the racism in the world it depicts. What she rejects is the demand that we look away from one in order to enjoy the other.
04Chapter 4 — The stories we let do our seeing
Step back from any single essay and Castillo's larger argument comes into view: reading is a political and cultural act, whether or not we admit it. The stories we absorb are the lenses through which we later interpret strangers, neighbors, headlines, whole peoples. We do not encounter the world raw. We encounter it already narrated, and the narrations we have consumed most often become the ones we trust without checking.
This reframes what is at stake in a book that might otherwise sound like it belongs only to literature seminars. If our imaginations are furnished largely by stories that centered one kind of person and treated others as backdrop, then our sense of who is fully human is furnished the same way. Castillo is arguing that the private habit of reading has public consequences — that a country's capacity for justice is not unrelated to whose lives its citizens have learned to picture as real.
05Conclusion
Castillo began by rejecting the sentence everyone repeats — that reading makes us better people — and by the end she has replaced it with something less flattering and more demanding. Reading does not automatically improve anyone. It can just as easily confirm our blind spots, soothe us with the feeling of understanding while we understand nothing, and let us mistake a narrow inheritance for the whole of human experience. Whether it does the opposite depends entirely on the attention we are willing to bring.
