How our lives became a real page-turner

It started modestly enough, with a promise by a father to read to his daughter for 100 consecutive nights. But it grew into something that neither could have predicted, as Alice Ozma recalls

Tome raiders: Alice and her father Jim with some of the books he read to her

Tome raiders: Alice and her father Jim with some of the books he read to her

My father and I can never get the story straight on how it began. We agree on a few of the details, but I was just nine years old, and he is getting older now. Our individual versions of how the reading marathon we called ‘the streak’ started change so often it is impossible to come to any sort of conclusion. We can’t even remember when we started calling it the streak, or whose idea it was to do so. If we’d known it would eventually span almost nine years, from primary school to my first day of college, we might have taken notes. Of course, we both remember how it ended. That’s the sort of event even my father can’t forget, an event we dreaded for years.

But I’m sure it started on a train to Boston. We were reading L Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz, the 12th book in the beloved Oz series. The woman across the aisle turned to us and asked why my father was reading to me on a train. We told her that this was what we always did – he had been reading to me every night for as long as
I could remember, ever since we read Pinocchio when I was four.

But her surprise made us think. If we were going to read on holiday anyway, how hard could it be to make reading every night an official goal? I suggested to my father – a school librarian whose job included reading to his students – that we aim for 100 consecutive nights of reading, and he agreed to the challenge. That is how I remember it.

Our rules were clear: my father had to read aloud to me for at least ten minutes (but almost always much more) per night, every night, before midnight, with no exceptions. It should come from whatever book we were reading at the time, but if we were out of the house when midnight approached, anything from magazines to baseball programmes would do.

The reading should be done in person, but over the phone would suffice. Well, just barely. I could always hear the annoyance in my father’s voice when I called to inform him that I was sleeping at a friend’s. He’d sigh and put down the phone, and I’d wait for him to go and get our book. Sometimes, he’d ask me to call back in ten minutes. ‘I haven’t even pre-read it yet!’ he’d protest. He insisted on rehearsing (and with more adult books, sometimes censoring) our reading ahead of time.

Alice has put together a list of her favourite books

When we reached our 100th night, my father closed the book with a sense of finality, despite the fact that we had a night or two of pages left. We’d made quite a dent in Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days! by Stephen Manes, a short paperback about a boy who was reading a guide to life improvement that featured some bizarre advice, such as putting a piece of broccoli on a string around his neck. Even after we’d closed the book, we stayed nestled under the covers of his bed, laughing and talking about the strange guide. We had finished 100 nights of reading. We had met our goal.

The following morning we celebrated by going to Flick’s Café, a small, nondescript building on the somewhat poor side of town with white walls, tiled floors, grey tables and seats that might have become uncomfortable if the food didn’t arrive before you had time to notice. To us there wasn’t anywhere better in Millville, New Jersey. We had been going to Flick’s for years. We came in and sat at our usual table by the door. We didn’t need to ask for menus, because we were ordering our usual meals – pancakes for my father and cinnamon-raisin French toast for me. It wouldn’t have seemed like much of a celebration, since it hardly differed from our norm, but the air had that charged feeling of accomplishment.

When the owner learned why we were there, he began asking us questions. Had it been hard? Did we finish every book? Didn’t the routine get boring after a while? And finally, what happens next? We smiled at him, without saying anything, because
we hadn’t really talked about it yet. We knew we would keep reading, because it was what we always did. But what did come next? ‘You know,’ I said, when my father’s pancakes were fully buttered the way he liked them, ‘I have been giving this a lot of consideration. And I have decided that it is only logical for us to go for 1,000 nights.’ I can’t remember what I was originally going to suggest, but 1,000 nights wasn’t it. Still, once I said it, it sounded right. The 1,000-night reading streak – that was still one less than The Arabian Nights, and just as impressive. ‘Well,’ my father said, ‘I guess it couldn’t hurt to try. What the heck. One thousand nights.’ I clapped my hands delightedly.

By this time, my parents’ marriage was not working out. On the rare occasions they spoke to each other, more often than not they argued. So it wasn’t a complete surprise when, almost exactly a year after setting our 1,000-night goal, my mother moved out, leaving my father as a single parent. Single fathers of girls have a lot of tricky issues to face. They deal with puberty, boys and dating as best they can. I give them, and especially my father, enormous credit for this. My grandmother passed away when I was 13. My elder sister, Kath, moved out while I was in middle school. My father was too proud to ask his sister for advice. So with relatively little female input, he found his way through the maze of teenage girlhood right beside me, learning to trust me and, eventually, the boys I chose to date. I am proud to say that, most of the time, he fully understood what he was doing and made reasonable, logical decisions. I chalk some of this up to all the books we read about young girls. They were almost entirely fiction, but they were usually quite realistic and gave us both great insight into what ‘normal’ girls and ‘normal’ families did.

Even with all of our reading, though, some things still baffled my father. As my senior year of high school came to a close, I realised that the prom was one of those things. My father just didn’t understand the hype. ‘It’s one night!’ he kept repeating, whenever he saw the list of things I needed to buy and do. My list was quite modest compared to most girls I knew: I wanted my hair done, only because I didn’t know how to do it myself. I wanted a dress.

‘Surprise!’ I said, as he saw the dress that I’d bought at a thrift store, and my updo, and even the cat-like fake nails for the first time. ‘Well,’ he said, lowering his eyes and hushing his voice, ‘you are certainly something else. You have never looked so beautiful.’ It was a word I’d never heard him use to describe a person. A painting, a house, a lake, maybe. He was waiting for some big day to use it. My face was warm as I beamed up at him.

Because the prom would go on until midnight and a friend was having a campfire afterwards, we had to do our reading beforehand. My preparations had taken ages, and this was the only time in the day that we were both free. And so, at 18 years old, in my full prom attire, I nestled up next to my father to hear a chapter from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens before my date arrived. ‘When we last left off…’ my father began. I thought I heard him say, ‘When we last left off you were nine years old. You chewed your hair when you were nervous. You hated boys and dresses. I was terrified to be a single father.’ He didn’t actually say that, though. He just summarised the last chapter, as he always did, and moved on to the next. In that way, our 3,170th night of reading wasn’t so different from our first.

We had decided that the streak would end when I went to college. If not then, when? And we knew the date: 2 September 2006. When the day came, we sat on some steps near my new college dorm. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was our compromise, since we couldn’t agree on which Oz book we’d been reading when we started the streak. This wasn’t it, but it was symbolic to us: the first Oz book. My father’s voice was calm, deeper than usual, round and soothing. He read with a slow confidence that made the first chapter last longer than it probably did the first, second and third times we’d read this book. He must have been rehearsing for quite some time, or maybe he was just remembering from years gone by, because he barely seemed to be looking at the page.

I tried to soak it all up and not think about the future. In ten minutes, I would be a college student and he would be on his way home without me for the first time. I saw that the first chapter, which he’d marked off with a paper clip, was getting smaller and smaller. When we got to the page with the paper clip, my eyes started to water. I heard a change in my father’s voice, he got even slower but it was inevitable – 3,218 nights and days left us here. The streak was over.

We called it the 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. Thirteen years ago, my father made the reading promise to me. He kept his word.

Adapted from The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma, to be published on 9 June by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99, with free p&p, contact the you bookshop on 0845 155  0711, you-bookshop.co.uk


WEB EXCLUSIVE: ALICE'S FULL LIST

For parents and children who would like to begin their own reading promise, Alice has put together a list of favourite books that are a good starting point for various ages.


Age 6-8

Top choice: Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Scary moments, but about as fun as books get

Other favourites: Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A A Milne, Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater, Dot and Tot of Merryland by L  Frank Baum, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo by Judy Blume.

Age 8-10

Top choice: The Bears’ House by Marilyn Sachs. A book you’ll remember for ever. Very sad, but rewarding.

Other favourites: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days! by Stephen Manes, Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, The Encyclopedia Brown series by Donald J Sobol.

Age 10-12

Top choice: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. I was obsessed with this. Who says older kids can’t enjoy fairy tales?

Other favourites: Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli, Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S Tolan, The View from Saturday by E L Konigsburg, It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville, Hoot by Carl Hiaasen.

Age 12-14

Top choice: The Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. I suppose these are ‘boy books’, but we devoured them. Alex, a sort of child James Bond, is the epitome of cool.

Other favourites:  The Harry Potter Series by J K Rowling, Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles, Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan, Holes by Louis Sachar.

Age 14-16

Top choice: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. One of the most suspenseful mysteries ever written. I ended up reading tons of Agatha Christie after this!

Other favourites:  Up a Road Slowly and Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt, Goodbye, Mr Chips by James Hilton, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Wish You Well by David Baldacci.

Age 16-18

Top choice: The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. Written for adults, but it worked well as a transition to reading on my own. Moving without being too soppy.

Other favourites Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Pigman by Paul Zindel, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.




 
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