Reading Towards Someone
There is a particular kind of reading that is also a kind of reaching.
You have picked up a book because someone you love — or someone you are still trying to understand, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes very different — loved it. Or hated it. Or pressed it into your hands once and said you have to read this, or refused to discuss it, or left it on a shelf where you found it after they were gone. And now it is in your hands and you are reading it not just as a reader but as something else simultaneously. As a detective. As a child. As someone trying to find a person inside a story they once sat with.
This is one of the most intimate things reading can do. And one of the least talked about.
The parent before they were your parent.
Here is the thing about parents that takes most of us a long time to fully absorb.
They existed before us. Completely. Wholly. As full and complicated and unresolved human beings, they moved through the world for decades before we arrived in it — falling in love and making mistakes and being afraid and wanting things and reading books that meant something to them at a time when we were not yet a thought in anyone's mind.
The books a parent loved before you were born are a portal to that person. To the version of them that existed before the role of parent arrived and, inevitably, began to define how you see them. Before they became yours. Before they became responsible and fallible and complicated in all the specific ways that parents become complicated for the children who need them.
A book your father loved at twenty-two is a window into a twenty-two year old man who had no idea you were coming. Who was reading because something in the story spoke to something in him — some hunger or fear or longing or question he was living with at that specific moment. Who was, in the private space of reading, simply himself.
Reading that book is an act of meeting him there. In that private space. As himself. And the encounter is almost always surprising — because the person you meet in the books your parents loved is never quite the person you thought you knew.
What the loved book tells you.
When a parent loved a book — really loved it, in the way that leaves a mark — the book is evidence of something. It is evidence of what they needed at the time they read it. What question they were living with. What kind of story spoke to them. What they were capable of feeling when no one was watching.
To Kill a Mockingbird loved by a parent tells you something about their moral framework, about the values they were forming or affirming, about what kind of justice mattered to them at an age when these things were still being decided.
The Alchemist loved by a parent tells you something about their longing — about the dreams they were carrying or trying to carry, the version of themselves they were reaching toward, the belief they needed that the world would cooperate with the person they were trying to become.
A Farewell to Arms loved by a parent tells you something about their relationship with loss — about whether they ran toward difficult emotion in art or sought it out because something in their own experience resonated with the particular quality of Hemingway's grief.
These are not definitive readings. A book means different things to different people and the same book means different things to the same person at different ages. But a book that a parent loved is a clue. It is a piece of evidence in the ongoing investigation of who this person actually is — beneath the role, beneath the history between you, beneath everything that has accumulated over a lifetime of being parent and child together.
And sometimes the clue is the most direct access you will ever have to the interior life of someone you love but do not fully know. Because most parents do not talk about who they were before you. Most of them have difficulty articulating what they felt at twenty or thirty or forty — the things that moved them, the things they needed, the questions they were living with. But the books they loved hold that information. The books remember what the person has forgotten to say.
What the hated book tells you.
This is perhaps the more interesting case.
The book a parent hated — or refused to read, or put down unfinished, or dismissed with a specific and disproportionate contempt — is often more revealing than the book they loved. Because our hatreds are less curated than our loves. We know what we are supposed to love, culturally and socially, and we often present our loves with some awareness of how they reflect on us. But our hatreds arrive with less self-consciousness. They come from somewhere less managed.
A parent who refuses to read anything sad. A parent who dismisses literary fiction as self-indulgent. A parent who has strong opinions about which books are worth reading and which are a waste of time. These are not simply aesthetic preferences. They are windows into something — into a way of managing the world, a relationship with feeling, a history that makes certain kinds of stories feel threatening or pointless or too close.
The parent who will not read books about grief is often the parent who has not found a way to sit with their own. The parent who dismisses emotional fiction as weak is often the parent who was taught that emotion itself was weak. The parent who reads only to be entertained, who is impatient with ambiguity and resistant to difficulty, is often the parent who has learned — somewhere, from something — that being troubled by a story is a luxury they cannot afford.
Reading the book your parent hated — sitting with it, letting it do what it does, allowing yourself to be moved by the things they would not allow themselves to be moved by — is sometimes an act of quiet courage. A small departure from the inherited relationship with feeling. A way of saying: I am allowed to feel this even if you were not.
When the book was left behind.
There is a category of this experience that carries a particular weight.
The book found on a parent's shelf after they are gone. The novel with their handwriting in the margins — not many parents annotate, but some do, and finding it is like finding a voice. The paperback with a receipt from 1987 used as a bookmark, the receipt itself a piece of evidence about an ordinary day in a life that is no longer ordinary because it is over. The book they were reading when they died, unfinished, the bookmark still in it at page two hundred and twelve.
Reading this book is different from any other reading. It is an act of accompaniment. You are going somewhere they went, or were going, or intended to go. You are finishing something they started. You are, in the only way still available to you, spending time in the same world they inhabited.
Many people who have lost a parent describe this experience as one of the most profound forms of grief and connection simultaneously. The story becomes a shared space. A place where, for the duration of the reading, the distance between you and the person who is gone feels smaller. Not because the book brings them back — nothing brings them back — but because you are, for a while, doing what they did. Seeing what they saw. Living inside the same pages.
This is not delusion. It is one of the oldest and most human things literature can do. Stories have always been the place where the living and the dead meet. Where the person who is gone can still speak, still reach, still matter — not through memory alone but through the living encounter with the words they once sat with.
When the book becomes a conversation.
Sometimes the most extraordinary thing that can happen from this kind of reading is that it opens a conversation that had no other door.
You read the book your mother loved. You tell her you read it. And something in that statement — the fact that you sought out this specific thing of hers, that you wanted to understand something about her through it — unlocks something. She tells you when she first read it. What was happening in her life. What it meant to her at the time. She tells you things about herself that she would not have told you if you had simply asked — because the question tell me about yourself is too large and too vulnerable, but the question what did this book mean to you is specific and safe and opens a door that goes somewhere real.
Books are extraordinarily good at this. At being the indirect route to direct feeling. At providing a container for the conversations that have no other shape. The parent and child who cannot talk about the hard things between them can sometimes talk about the hard things in a book — and find, in that talking, that they have also talked about the hard things between them. The story provides cover. And under the cover, the real conversation happens.
If there is a book your parent loved that you have not yet read — and if there is still time, if they are still here — consider reading it. Not because it will be your favourite book. Not because you will love it the way they love it. But because picking up the phone afterward and saying I read it is the beginning of a conversation that might go somewhere neither of you expected.
These conversations are worth having. They are worth having urgently. Because the shelf does not wait. The books do not wait. And the person whose books they are will not always be here to tell you what they meant.
The inheritance of taste.
Here is a strange and tender thing about reading in families.
Taste travels. Not perfectly, not predictably, not always in the direction we expect — but something moves between the people who share a reading life, even a partial one, even an interrupted one. The parent who read aloud to you when you were small gave you something about the sound of language that lives in you still. The parent whose shelves you browsed as a teenager — even if you took nothing from them, even if you found nothing that appealed — gave you a sense of what a reading life looked like. That reading was something adults did. That books accumulated. That a shelf could tell a story about a person.
And sometimes the inheritance is more direct. You discover, reading a book your parent loved, that you love it too — not because you were supposed to, not because you were trying to, but because whatever in them responded to it is also in you. The same hunger. The same question. The same part of the human experience that the book addresses, passed down through blood or proximity or simply the shared condition of being human in a family together.
These moments of discovered inheritance are quietly extraordinary. They are the moments when you understand something about where you came from — not as information but as felt experience. When the book becomes a bridge between two people across time, and you stand on it, and look back, and understand that you are more continuous with the person behind you than you always knew.
Books Worth Reading Towards Someone
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho
A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
The Thorn Birds — Colleen McCullough
Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran
Flowers in the Attic — V.C. Andrews