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.

Quick Reviews: Cooking a Wolf, Growing a Tomato, Rooting for ME

Rather than try to write more detailed reviews of books I read more than a month ago, I'm offering this quick rundown as a way to get caught up so to speak. Here goes:

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher. I did not read the original edition, written during World War II when Americans were not free to waste a single stick of butter or a pricey cut of meat. Rather, I read an edition in which Fisher came back and updated her original book with a few after-thoughts, after times had improved. Fisher's sense of humor and helpful thoughts on food and cooking make for an informative and fun read.

Unlike Fisher, William Alexander, author of The $64 Tomato, wasn't looking for ways to save money on food when he set out to raise some homegrown tomatoes. And that's a good thing because this amateur gardener learned that those tomatoes cost a lot more than manpower and patience. They also cost money, big money by the time he bought the electrical fencing to ward off the groundhogs and a possum, paid for expensive gardening-design advice, fertilized, watered, added other plants and .... well, you name it. Alexander has a great self-effacing humor, and the book is a winner.

Anthem by Ayn Rand offers a quick way to get an introduction to Ayn Rand's writing and her beliefs, her obsession with individualism vs. the greater good as some might call it. Unlike some of her other novels, this one is slender. It's basically a novella.

Still to come: Kitchen and Gourmet Rhapsody, both wonderful books.