My grandmother read westerns. Paperback Louis L’Amour novels with cracked spines and sun-faded covers, stacked on the table beside her recliner in a house that smelled like coffee and wool. She read one every few days, sometimes recycling through the same ones she’d read before, and she never once, in all the years I knew her, expressed interest in reading anything else. My mother read mysteries. Agatha Christie, then Patricia Cornwell, then eventually every Scandinavian crime novelist who got translated into English. My father read exactly two kinds of books: military history and Tom Clancy. He kept them in his office on a shelf that sagged visibly in the middle.

When I was a teenager, I thought all of this was faintly embarrassing. I was reading Kafka and Hemingway by then, assigned in school and sought out on my own, and I had the standard young person’s conviction that my taste was better than my family’s. I never said this out loud, but I thought it. The literary fiction I was reading was serious. Their genre fiction was entertainment. Looking back, I was an insufferable snob, and I was also wrong about nearly everything.

The question of how to share books across generations, how to bridge the gaps in taste, experience, and expectation that separate family members, is one I’ve been thinking about since I started working in publishing. It’s a personal question as much as a professional one. I’ve spent years trying to get my parents to read the books I love, and they’ve spent years politely declining. Meanwhile, some of the most meaningful reading experiences I’ve had as an adult have come from finally picking up the kinds of books they always read. The bridge I was trying to build was there all along. I just had to walk across it from the other direction.

Let me start with the practical challenge. Family members often have wildly different reading levels, preferences, and relationships with books. Your twelve-year-old who devours graphic novels is not the same reader as your seventy-year-old parent who reads one literary novel a month. Your spouse who listens to audiobooks during their commute is not the same reader as your sibling who hasn’t finished a book since college. Recommending books across these differences requires empathy, flexibility, and a willingness to set aside your own preferences.

The most common mistake I see is recommending books you love instead of books the other person might love. These are not the same thing. I adore Cormac McCarthy, but I would never recommend “Blood Meridian” to my mother, who reads for comfort and pleasure and has no interest in literary violence. Giving someone a book they’ll hate isn’t generous. It’s selfish. You’re not sharing a book; you’re asserting your taste. Real sharing means understanding what the other person enjoys and finding something that works for them, even if it’s not what you’d choose for yourself.

Here’s my framework for recommending books across generational lines. First, ask what they’ve loved recently. Not what they’re reading now, but what they’ve genuinely loved. The answer will tell you more about their taste than any genre label. If your father says he loved a particular thriller, ask him what he loved about it. Was it the pacing? The setting? The main character? The answer lets you recommend something adjacent. If he loved the setting (say, Cold War Berlin), you can suggest another book set in that world, even one from a different genre. If he loved the pacing, you can suggest another fast-moving book. You’re matching on the quality they value, not on the surface category.

Second, find books that work on multiple levels. Some books are genuinely cross-generational because they operate differently for different readers. “The Hobbit” is the classic example. A ten-year-old reads it as an adventure story. A forty-year-old reads it as a meditation on comfort versus purpose. A seventy-year-old reads it as a story about a late-in-life journey. The text is the same, but the reading experience changes with the reader. Books like this are gold for family sharing because everyone can enjoy them, even if they’re enjoying different things.

Third, consider format. This is where a lot of family book-sharing fails. Your teenager might prefer audiobooks. Your parent might prefer large-print editions. Your sibling might only read on their phone. Recommending a book without considering how the person will actually consume it is setting them up for friction. I’ve had great success giving audiobooks to family members who “don’t have time to read.” They have time to listen. They just didn’t think of listening as reading. (It is.)

The generational divide in reading taste is real, but I think it’s narrower than people assume. My parents and I disagree about plenty, but we’ve found surprising common ground in certain authors. We all love John le Carre. We all love Erik Larson’s narrative nonfiction. We all love anything by Bill Bryson. These are authors who write well enough to satisfy a literary reader and accessibly enough to satisfy a genre reader. They exist in a middle ground that gets overlooked by the literary establishment and the genre community alike, and they’re perfect for cross-generational sharing.

Family book clubs are something I recommend enthusiastically, with caveats. The idea is simple: family members read the same book and discuss it, either in person or over the phone. The reality is complicated. Family dynamics don’t pause for book discussion. If your brother always dominates conversations, he’ll dominate the book club. If your mother takes any criticism of her reading taste personally, suggesting changes to her choices will go badly. The book club needs ground rules, and the most important one is: no judgment about what someone did or didn’t enjoy. The point is sharing the experience, not winning an argument.

I’ve been in a family book club, informal as these things go, for about three years now. It’s me, my mother, my sister, and my aunt. We take turns picking books. The picks have ranged from literary fiction (my choices, predictably) to cozy mysteries (my aunt’s) to memoirs (my mother’s) to young adult novels (my sister’s, which she reads with her kids). What I’ve found is that reading outside my comfort zone for family discussion has been one of the best things to happen to my reading life. I’ve discovered entire subgenres I’d dismissed. I’ve had conversations about books that revealed things about my family members I never knew. My aunt’s reaction to a particular memoir sparked a conversation about her own childhood that we’d never had in thirty years of family gatherings. Books created a safe space for that conversation in a way that direct questions never could have.

Reading with children deserves special attention, because the habits formed in childhood determine adult reading behavior more than any other factor. Research on reading development consistently shows that children who are read to regularly by parents become readers themselves. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how long this effect lasts. Being read to as a preschooler correlates with reading habits decades later. The investment you make in reading to a four-year-old pays dividends when they’re forty.

But reading with children, as opposed to reading to them, requires a different approach as they grow older. A five-year-old is happy to be read to. A twelve-year-old wants to choose their own books and would rather die than have a parent read aloud to them. The transition from reading-to to reading-alongside is tricky. One approach that works well is parallel reading: you and your child each read your own books in the same room, at the same time. No discussion required. Just the shared experience of reading as a normal family activity. This normalizes reading in a way that exhortations to “put down your phone and pick up a book” never will. Children learn from what they see, not from what they’re told.

For teenagers specifically, I’d urge parents to resist the temptation to direct their reading. If your teenager wants to read manga, let them read manga. If they want to read dystopian young adult fiction, let them read it. If they want to read horror, romance, or comic books, support that. Any reading is better than no reading, and the path from genre fiction to literary fiction (if that path is even necessary, which I’d argue it isn’t) usually runs through enthusiasm rather than obligation. A teenager who loves reading because they discovered a series that speaks to them is more likely to become a lifelong reader than a teenager who was force-fed “The Great Gatsby” and came to associate books with homework.

I think often about the reading relationship I had with my grandmother. She never pushed her westerns on me, and I never pushed my literary fiction on her. But we talked about reading constantly. She’d tell me about the L’Amour novel she was rereading, describing the open plains and the characters with a warmth that made me understand why she loved them. I’d tell her about whatever I was reading for school, and she’d listen with genuine interest, asking questions that showed she was paying attention even if the books weren’t her style. We never shared a single book. We shared the love of reading. Looking back, that mattered more.

The specific books are almost beside the point. What I’m really talking about is creating a culture of reading within a family, which is different from curating a family reading list. A culture of reading means books are visible in the home. It means conversations about what you’re reading happen naturally, not as assignments. It means going to bookstores together is a family activity. It means giving books as gifts, not because you think the person needs to read more, but because you know they’ll enjoy this particular book. It means respecting each other’s taste, even when you don’t share it.

I’ve noticed that the families who read together tend to communicate better in general. I can’t prove causation, but the correlation is strong in my experience. Reading gives you a shared vocabulary for discussing emotions, conflicts, and ideas that might be difficult to discuss directly. It’s easier to talk about a character’s grief than your own. It’s easier to explore a moral dilemma in fiction than in real life. Books provide distance from difficult subjects, and sometimes that distance is exactly what a family needs to approach something they’ve been avoiding.

One thing that works surprisingly well across generations is re-reading. If your parent or grandparent has a favorite book, ask them about it. Not “what’s it about” but “why do you love it?” Then read it yourself. You’ll be reading the same words they read, but you’ll experience them differently because you’re a different person in a different time. When you discuss the book afterward, those differences become the conversation. My mother re-reads “Pride and Prejudice” every few years, and when I finally read it in my thirties (having dismissed it as a teenager), we had one of the best literary conversations of our lives. She saw the comedy and the social commentary. I was struck by Austen’s ruthlessness about economic reality. We were reading the same book from completely different angles, and the collision of our perspectives was more interesting than either would have been alone.

Gifting books well is an underrated skill. Most people give books as gifts the same way they recommend them: based on their own taste rather than the recipient’s. I’ve received dozens of books as gifts over the years, and the ones that meant the most were chosen by people who clearly thought about what I would enjoy, not what they thought I should enjoy. A great book gift says “I see you.” A bad book gift says “I wish you were more like me.” If you don’t know what to give, a gift card to an independent bookstore is almost always welcome. It lets the person choose their own adventure while still communicating that you support their reading habit.

If you want to start sharing books with your family and you don’t know where to begin, start small. Don’t announce a family book club with meetings and schedules. Just mention what you’re reading at dinner. Ask what they’re reading. If someone mentions a book that sounds interesting, pick it up. If you finish a book you think a family member would enjoy (based on their taste, not yours), pass it along with a sticky note that says “thought you might like this.” No pressure. No assignment. Just an invitation. The best reading relationships, like the best relationships of any kind, grow from small gestures repeated over time. Your grandmother’s stack of L’Amour novels might seem like a world away from your Booker Prize shortlist. But the impulse behind both, the desire to sit down with a story and let it carry you somewhere, is exactly the same. Start there.