Every now and then, I’ll know it’s time to pick a book from my teetering pile of books about reading. I mean this literally, except there is not one pile: there are three. They stand about three feet tall, behind the door into my living room, as there simply isn’t space for them anywhere else – and they are not in any order, so that read and unread books, old and new, a scattergun of unalphabetised authors sit there.
The most recent choice was The Reading Promise (2011) by Alice Ozma, which my friend Malie gave me for my birthday last year. The subtitle tells you what is going on: ‘3,218 nights of reading with my father’.
Opinions differ, within the book, about how the promise started. But it seems to have started on a train. Alice’s dad – Jim – regularly read to Alice at night and now, in 1998, when Alice was in third grade (the internet tells me this is aged eight or nine) they decided to make this casual habit into something official. They started The Streak. Now, their opinions differ on whether they initially set out to do a hundred days or a thousand – one remembers the hundred-day streak ending with a commitment to add another 900 days, while the other thinks it was a thousand at the outset – but the commitment was made.
When I started reading Ozma’s book, I thought it might feature a lot of the books they discussed. And they are in there, of course. But the specifics are somewhat incidental to what is really a memoir of a father/daughter relationship – one that became all the more important after Ozma’s parents divorced. Their shared love of reading managed to get past the awkward teenage period, and they were able to put aside temporary feuds to ensure they had at least a few minutes of reading every night – though Ozma movingly remembers the final time that she lay in the crook of her dad’s arm as he read. And even that was an unusual concession to the significance of the nightly ritual: Ozma builds up a picture of a kind, intelligent, funny and very loving man, but he is not the warm, huggy man you might be picturing from the premise.
My dad is not an affectionate man. As a librarian, he told his students not to touch him, warning them that his skin was poisonous. Kindergarteners seemed to accept this as fact, but the older students often wondered why they couldn’t just give their favourite teacher a hug. He does not like to be touched, and he does not want to touch other people. After school concerts or award ceremonies, I saw other parents hug and sometimes even kiss their children. My father considered it a bold and almost over-the-top display to stick one finger in my hair and scrtach my scalp for a moment with his cracked fingernail, like he was helping me get an itch I just couldn’t reach. If the event called for such a grand gesture, he would do it quickly and then back away several feet.
The portrait of Jim is necessarily very subjective, and I wasn’t always sure that I would like him were I to meet him, but I loved reading the evolving relationship of father and daughter (with other members of the family much more peripheral). Reading is more of a thread through the tapestry than the main content – there is, for instance, no complete list of books read, just some pages of the ones they remember, ranging from childhood classics to presidential biographies, via Dickens, Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many, many books I haven’t heard of.
And because the reading is really a portal to their relationship, there are lots of chapters about totally unrelated things. There is a clarion call against the American education system for its devaluing of reading. There are the various relationships her father has after divorce, and what an extending, evolving family feels like. The most fascinating tangent is where Ozma writes about her vivid fear of JFK. Even when she learns he is dead, the fear doesn’t abate: she is terrified that his body (still, somehow, evil and out to get her) is in her bedroom. Holding a book he once loved leaves her scrubbing her hands like Lady Macbeth. The terror is so unusual that a novelist might be wary of using it, but Ozma describes it with a heady recollection of the fear, as well as self-awareness about how unrelatable it is, at least as a specific phobia. It’s not what I expected in a memoir about reading, but these sorts of details and anecdotes help set The Reading Promise apart from any book-about-books that ends up retreading familiar ground.
Why did The Streak end? There isn’t a sad story here: it simply ended because Ozma went away to college. And this book is really a tribute to what a beautiful thing it was. An obsessive, perhaps peculiar version of many father/daughter relationships – but lovely to read a memoir of resilient love, and a generational love of reading that persisted long beyond the close of the book. Here are the final words of The Reading Promise (which, in case it isn’t clear, is a book I loved reading):
We called it The Reading Streak, but it was really more of a promise. A promise to each other, a promise to ourselves. A promise to always be there and to never give up. It was a promise of hope in hopeless times. It was a promise of comfort when things got uncomfortable. And we kept our promise to each other.
But more than that, it was a promise to the world: a promise to remember the power of the printed word, to take time to cherish it, to protect it at all costs. He promised to explain, to anyone and everyone he meets, the life-changing ability literature can have. He promised to fight for it. So that’s what he’s doing.
Thirteen years ago, my father made the reading promise to me. He kept his word.