How to Read Now: Essays

Anyone who is perfectly comfortable with keeping the world just as it is now and reading it the way they’ve always read it—is, frankly, a fed, cannot be trusted, and is probably wiretapping your phone.

Firs, roses, statues—and the placards that adorn them—are like history books in public: they’re civic sites of collective reading, where the statue tells us to read the ground we’re standing on; to interpret it in a specific way.

The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.

An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.

Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

No, what they are defending is their comfort, and what they are preserving is their power—neither of which is the same thing as freedom, as those of us who have known lives without either can attest.

Certainly modernity has taught us the beguiling story of our porousness; being full of gaps is also a way of being full of market opportunities.

What I’m much more curious about is what these fuckups reveal about readership: who we expect our readers to be, what we expect our readers to do, and how this might change.

Readers do half the work of a book’s life; that means we must do half the heavy lifting of its project.