Avid readers should not miss reading Alice Ozma’s “The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared,” especially those readers who are occasionally anxious about the encroachment of technology on traditional books, those books of our childhoods, with their rustling pages, distinctive smells and enticing covers.
An engaging memoir of short, essay-like entries, this book follows Alice and her father, Jim Brozina, an elementary school librarian, on a nine-year journey through literature. Along the way, small and momentous episodes of their lives are intertwined with the books they are reading, for what begins as a pledge to read together every day for 100 nights stretches to 1,000 and then to more than 3,200 nights.
Alice is 9 years old when they begin, with her father reading aloud to her from children’s classics, Newbery winners and quality contemporary fiction. The Reading Streak, they call it. Their reading sees them through, among other things, her mother’s leaving, her grandfather’s death and the less tragic, but perhaps just as stressful, search for a prom dress. The last day of the Streak coincides with her being dropped off at college, a tender scene that, as someone who has worked hard to pass along a passion for books to my own daughters, I found touching. After a near-desperate search for a quiet place on campus to share their final moments of the Streak, “We read like we always did,” Ozma writes. “My father and I, together, sharing words that weren’t our own but were still a part of our secret language.”