The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared is Alice Ozma's account of her and her father's years of reading aloud to each other for 3,218 consecutive days. The commitment the two made to each other when Alice was a child in 1998 ended only when moved away to begin college.

The book is also Ozma's way of paying homage to her father, a retired elementary school librarian who raised her and her sister alone after their mother left. It evolves -- or devolves, depending on your point of view -- into one assailing the school administrators who forbade her from from reading aloud to small children. These officials become such incompetent villains that the book cries for their side of the story. Why did they get rid of so many books in the library, as Ozma says they did? Why did they want her father to focus only on computers rather than books in a library? Perhaps, the officials are the mindless demons Ozma describes, but I wonder.

Ozma, whose name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice and from Frank Baum's Oz books, clearly grew up in a home that cherished reading. Each chapter begins with a quote from a book she and her father shared -- from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Lois Lowry's The Giver and A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner.

At one point, I stopped reading the book because, except for those quotations, the book was dealing little with what Alice and her father read and how it changed their lives. I decided to give it a second try, though, and grew to like it the farther I got into it. Still, there was something or some things about the book I never came to like.

First, Ozma's story gets tedious, even childish, at times. Perhaps that's in part because she's young and too vividly remembering her childhood. But reading about her temper tantrums and such when they contribute nothing to the overall story is really boring, especially when I for one deal with more than enough of such behavior in my own home.

And frankly, Ozma's father seems a bit too odd. I kept thinking, in fact -- there's another reason he had trouble with school administrators. His daughter may not know it. And the reader can only suspect it.

Ozma left me wanting to know more about the reading experiences. Did she ever read to her father? That's what I thought was going to happen, but it became less clear as the book progressed. Why did they choose the books they choose? Which ones did they like, hate? Which ones helped her deal with her parents' divorce? Which ones helped her father? How did they go from Winnie the Pooh to Great Expectations -- and when? How, in other words, did their reading progress as Alice grew up?

Still, the book has some merit. It made me wish my daughter and I would read aloud more to each other. But the book could have had much more merit in the hands of a better writer.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Tell me to read a book, a novel per se, about a woman who is a magician's assistant -- yes, the always-pretty woman who appears to get sawed in half but comes out of the box intact with no legs or arms missing. Tell me the magician is gay, the woman is straight but in love with him, that she even marries him and lives a chaste life with him and his gay lover until they both die and leave her alone to inherit everything. Tell me she finds out -- to her dismay -- that this most cosmopolitan of men has a family in rural Nebraska -- a mom with permed hair and lots of secrets, a sister with an abusive husband, and more. And of course, they're mostly likable folks, ableit a tad strange.

Tell me I'll enjoy this book. Tell me I'll find it plausible. I'd think you were joshing or just plain clueless. But I did enjoy it. I did find it believable -- even a bit too predictable near the end. And, yes, I'd recommend it to you -- well, maybe not to my mother but to you, the people who read my blog and who find it not so incredible that a straight woman might knowingly marry a gay man -- and be happy.

Why should that premise even sound so bizarre? How many marriages between two straight people are based on convenience or need? How many start out based on love or on what the two thought was love but change in a few months or a few years? Maybe those couples are miserable. But I'd argue that not all of them are. Some of those people likely married for other reasons -- money, gratitude, need, companionship, expectations. And perhaps some married for love, but not the kind that's always consummated in the bedroom. Or maybe the reasons for the marriage changed over time with one or both spouses. I'm not saying these arrangements are ideal. But they exist and are probably more prevalent than traditionalists realize.

Patchett, also the author of the critically acclaimed Bel Canto, wrote this less well-known novel in the late 1990s. Her writing is clear, concise, lyrical. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." Well, maybe not: Those are the book's first two sentences.

This novel is about Sabine, a 40-something magician's assistant who lives in and loves Los Angeles. As the assistant, she's always been the one at the side, the one who stays out of the spotlight. But in Patchett's novel, Sabine takes the spotlight and proceeds to shine it on the other characters she comes to know through Parsifal, the man we never get to meet except through all of the other characters' shared memories.

And the fact that I loved this book, to my own surprise, perhaps speaks to the magic that literature can work in all of us.

Books About Books

Lately, I've been reading books about books. I started with Pat Conroy's excellent My Reading Life and Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, both reviewed earlier on this blog. Later, I read Alan Jacobs' less lively The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs works really hard, too hard, to tell us it's OK to read frivolous books and it's also OK to ignore all those must-read lists. The problem is, I ended up forcing myself to finish reading Jacobs' own sometimes tedious book.

Now, I'm reading Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home. It is absolutely delightful. It's the kind of book I grab when I wake up in the middle of the night and read another page or two. I take the light-weight paperback -- just 236 pages -- to the restroom with me. I carry it to work in the hope of a few free moments. I knew I could identify with Hill when she dared to admit she dislikes reading Jane Austen. Gasp!... At last, I realized: I am not alone among so-called educated people who struggle to enjoy Pride and Prejudice.

Somewhere in between Howards End Is on the Landing and Jacobs' book, I read and largely enjoyed Richard Horan's book, Seeds: One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers From Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. Horan's book is an offbeat combination of travel writing, botany and literature. It's full of interesting facts about the writers whose homes and trees he visits while collecting seeds to start legacy trees.

We learn, for instance, that the Tree of Heaven in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now considered invasive. We also learn that George Washington's legendary false teeth weren't wooden but were ivory. Outside the home of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, Horan gathered cherry seeds from her Pennsylvania yard, where nature thankfully is not yet silenced. At Carson McCullers' home, he collected bright-red magnolia seeds. He tells us how to transplant those seeds -- something I now hope to do with my own small magnolia tree and its seeds.

Books about books may sound like a waste of time. But I find I sometimes get other reading ideas in them, and it's also interesting to learn what others think about literary works I've sometimes loved, sometimes hated or just never got around to reading.