Editor’s Note:

A theme I see often in this magazine is the influence of parents on people’s reading. Whether it’s a room full of eclectic books to rummage through at whim, or the sight of a parent reading for pleasure, avid readers’ literary proclivities (I call dibs on that band name!) often trace back to their parents’ love of books.

My seventy-five-year-old mum recently told me, “I don’t remember the last time I went a day without reading.” I was dumbfounded (that’s more than twenty-five thousand days in a row, if you skip her first five years), but it tracks. Wherever we went as kids, Mum had a book: Bryce Courtenay, John Wyndham, Jilly Cooper, Gerald Durrell. She read anything that piqued her interest, and these days she won’t turn out the light without at least a chapter of a cozy mystery or light romance.

Dad was a big reader, too. Hemingway and the Beat Poets filled his 1970s collection on our shelves, and he delighted in acting out storybooks for us as kids. I now buy him novels every birthday and Christmas; A Gentleman in Moscow and The Art of Fielding were hits.

Our house was full of books: bedtime stories, audiobooks on cassette (the original audiobook), and so many library trips that I could have directed any patron to the shelf they needed.

My tastes aren’t especially like my parents’, though Dad and I both loved The Art of Fielding, and I’ll smash through a cozy mystery when I need comfort. But it’s not the content they passed on, it’s the love. For that, I’m forever grateful.

If you have littluns in your life, please help them find the love of reading. Literacy among young people is falling shockingly fast, and leaning on screens and AI is starting to chip away at their critical thinking, empathy and self-confidence. I shudder to think what I’d have become if reading hadn’t been as common as meals and baths in my house. A petty thief? A telemarketer? A… tech bro?!

In this issue: a young girl reading her way out of an abusive mother’s reach, a man learning about his mother through the only book she ever read, and also crepes, smut, letterpress printing, grief and absurdity, poetry, food violence, beach reads, small bookstores, and a tenacious Appalachian woman driving a Bookmobile—all from a bunch of wonderful writers whose lives have been made better by books.

Happy reading!

Gemma Peckham
Editor