Title: The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared
Author: Alice Ozma
Pages: 279
Finished: February 15, 2018
First Sentence: It started on a train.
Summary: This memoir tells about Alice's life with her father around the framework of their promise that he'll read to her every night.
Thoughts: This book has been in my sights since around 2012. I was a shelver then, and this book caught my eye while I was putting away non-fiction books. The flyleaf looked interesting, and I filed the title away. This year, while browsing the 000s for a book to add to my non-fiction challenge, I rediscovered this book. I very excitedly checked it out and brought it home.
I was disappointed.
I expected to learn more about the books and the whole reading nightly thing. My dad read to us nightly up until I was in around middle school. We stopped primarily because there just wasn't time to do it anymore between dance practice, piano lessons, flute lessons, tons of homework... I was really looking forward to learning about their tradition. Perhaps the issue is that one can't really delve into too much detail about this because it'll get boring fast.
Instead, the book really is a memoir about growing up with her father. Her father was a school librarian. It sounds like he was a very good librarian. He definitely knew the importance of reading aloud to kids (and adults). How important it was. And he was a feminist, which I think was really awesome. He read a ton of books with strong female characters which is so important.
But something didn't work. I think part of it is that it's hard to bring other people into your life without them judging it against theirs. Obviously her family worked for her, but it felt wrong to me. I found myself aghast at some things. How could she be talking about this like it was normal and okay? Perhaps that's a failing on my part, but I didn't particularly like the father, and I didn't feel the connection with the narrator that I expected to feel.
The two best things I can say about this book is it's quick to read, and they provide a list of the books they read in the back. Other than that, it's very skippable.
Read for my Nonfiction challenge.
I was disappointed.
I expected to learn more about the books and the whole reading nightly thing. My dad read to us nightly up until I was in around middle school. We stopped primarily because there just wasn't time to do it anymore between dance practice, piano lessons, flute lessons, tons of homework... I was really looking forward to learning about their tradition. Perhaps the issue is that one can't really delve into too much detail about this because it'll get boring fast.
Instead, the book really is a memoir about growing up with her father. Her father was a school librarian. It sounds like he was a very good librarian. He definitely knew the importance of reading aloud to kids (and adults). How important it was. And he was a feminist, which I think was really awesome. He read a ton of books with strong female characters which is so important.
But something didn't work. I think part of it is that it's hard to bring other people into your life without them judging it against theirs. Obviously her family worked for her, but it felt wrong to me. I found myself aghast at some things. How could she be talking about this like it was normal and okay? Perhaps that's a failing on my part, but I didn't particularly like the father, and I didn't feel the connection with the narrator that I expected to feel.
The two best things I can say about this book is it's quick to read, and they provide a list of the books they read in the back. Other than that, it's very skippable.
Read for my Nonfiction challenge.
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