In the years since my debut novel came out, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to read. Not about how to write—I wouldn’t trust a book about how to write by a debut novelist, any more than I would trust a book about how to swim by someone who’d accomplished the exceptional achievement of not having drowned, once. But reading? Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person. And in the postdebut years of touring, and traveling—in hotel rooms in Auckland and East Lansing, on festival stages in Manila and Rome, in bookstores in London, and in the renovated community library of my hometown, Milpitas—a thought came back to me, again and again; a ghost with unfinished business, a song I couldn’t get out of my head: we need to change how we read.
Thewe 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—but in truth, it’s a more capaciouswe than that, too. Awe of the reading world, perhaps. By readers I don’t just mean the literate, a community I don’t particularly issue from myself, although I am, in spite of everything, among its fiercest spear-bearers. I mean something more expansive and yet more humble: thewe that is in the world, and thinks about it, and then lives in it. That’s the kind of reader I am, and love—and that’s the reading practice I’m most interested in, and most alive to myself.
The second thought that has come to my house and still won’t grab its coat and leave is this: the way we read now is simply not good enough, and it is failing not only our writers—especially, but not limited to, our most marginalized writers—but failing our readers, which is to say, ourselves.
When I talk about reading, I don’t just mean books, though of course as a writer, 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. At heart, reading has never just been the province of books, or the literate. Reading doesn’t bring us to books; or at least, that’s not the trajectory that really matters. Sure, some of us are made readers—usually because of the gift (and privilege) of a literate parent, a friendly librarian, a caring kindergarten teacher—and as readers, we then come to discover the world of books. But the point of reading is not to fetishize books, however alluring they might look on an Instagram flat lay. Books, as world-encompassing as they are, aren’t the destination; they’re a waypoint. Reading doesn’t bring us to books—books bring us to reading. They’re one of the places we go to help us to become readers in the world. I know that growing up, film and TV were as important to my formation as a critical thinker—to the ways in which I engaged with “representation” in any real sense—so I can’t imagine not writing about them, even in a book supposedly about reading.
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. How to understand that it’s meaningful when Wes Anderson’s characters throw Filipinx bodies off an onscreen boat like they’re nothing; how to understand that bearing witness to that scene means noth
