How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person.

The we I’m talking about here is generally American, since that’s the particular cosmic sports team I’ve found myself on,

through the mysteries of fate and colonial genocide

the we that is in the world, and thinks about it, and then lives in it.

books remain kin to me in ways that other art forms—even ones I may have come to love with an easier enthusiasm, in recent years—aren’t.

Reading doesn’t bring us to books; or at least, that’s not the trajectory that really matters.

But the point of reading is not to fetishize

books, however alluring they might look on an Instagram flat lay.