A Father Seen through a Screen of Books: More about The Reading Promise

I'm still thinking about The Reading Promise. As I was reading this book, I was captivated, but I also kept having to stop because Alice Ozma's story of how she experienced her father was so moving to me. Even when he was embarrassing her to death, as parents so often do, or even when she had to adapt herself to his idiosyncrasies to her own inconvenience, her love and respect for him persisted-- and persist to this day. The story takes us past their reading streak and on to Mr. Brazina's empty-nest literary life, further emphasizing Ozma's reverence for his literary gifts. It's just the most lovely response to an unconventional childhood I have ever read.
 

20-29: How to Read a Book: The Reading Promise

020-029 starts with uninviting shelves about how to research and boring-looking but important books about library science, which are probably what I should have chosen now that I've volunteered to help organize my church's library. Instead, I kept looking till I got to 028, which looks suspiciously like 019 (books about books) but turns out to be the slightly different topic of books about reading. There was one I didn't bring home called Reading: the Solitary Vice, that I could only hope was written ironically. A book-long joke, though-- I just don't have time for that. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, which everyone was talking about last year, was also available, but as my mother and I say at craft fairs, "I could do that."

I was still torn, though, between an anthology of writings about reading and a memoir of a father-daughter reading streak that ended up lasting over 3,000 days. But it's the library! Everything's free and you are under no obligation to actually read everything you bring home! So they both came with me. But as soon as I opened The Reading Promise, I was completely captivated, and therefore have barely glanced at A Passion for Books, much as it might also reward my attention.

The Reading Promise bills itself as the story of "My Father and the Books We Shared," and it's not so much a book about reading as about the silliest, most awkward father you can imagine who happened to love to read to his daughter. She could have written Too Close to the Falls or The Glass Castle or even Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but it obviously didn't even occur to her to see herself as in any way a victim of her unconventional upbringing. Rather, she presents herself as the very privileged member of a secret society that was held together by books but also by a shared love of frozen custard, a shared disdain for boys and an ongoing dispute about the proper way to pet a cat.

The book is a series of vignettes following our author from 3rd grade until she leaves for college and their nightly practice of reading aloud finally ends. Some of the anecdotes directly relate to their experience with a specific book (any father of daughters will completely respect how he handled Dicey's Song), but many of the incidents related-- the fish funeral, the bad grade, the Boy Hater's Club-- take place in the other 23 hours and 45 minutes a day. But while not every incident directly involves a book, each one does give us more insight into the man who named his daughter Alice Ozma. The picture that emerges is of a man who was eccentric, prickly, but absolutely dedicated both to his daughter and to the value of books to enrich and even explain our lives. Spoiler alert to my family: I can't imagine a better Father's Day present.

So Many Books... You Know the Rest: More from Practical Classics

So many books, so many interesting perspectives on them from Practical Classics.

Sure, we all knew Bartleby was about a guy who preferred not to do his job, but how about Farenheit 451? Everyone knows The Joy Luck Club is about family, but that's not usually how we read or remember To Kill a Mockingbird (a good dad story) or Metamorphosis (a story about how not to handle the disability of a family member).

Everyone I know has heard, or heard of, or at least quoted without knowing they were doing so ("global village," anyone?), Marshall McLuhan, but I didn't know I owed the concept of "camp" to Susan Sontag or the phrase "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to Walter Benjamin. Smokler provides such thorough crib sheets for all three that I am now saved the trouble of reading the originals!

So now I am talked into attempting Maus, for its portrait of a difficult dad, and The Crying of Lot 49, not only because it looks interesting but because I've always wanted to read Thomas Pynchon and always not wanted to dedicate 6 months to Gravity's Rainbow. I'm even more excited about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again now that I know that it's about how we relax or whether we even can any more. Just the summary, at least while read on a beach that it took me 8 hours and hundreds of dollars to get to, gave me something to think about, and the fact that everything else David Foster Wallace has written seems to be a thousand pages long is a bonus. I'm even intrigued, if terrified, by Bastard out of Carolina for its promise of forgiveness in the middle of horror.

Below are links to the books I'm adding to my wish list. As always, you can explore without buying.

A Post about a Book about Books: Practical Classics

I decided to go with Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School. I like the fact that each essay is a few pages long, and I like the fact that the author writes very personally about his responses. What I don't like is that the author does not, to my mind, have a thorough command of the conventions of written English; he'll use structures like "both... also," and sometimes his flow of thought is not very clear. I wish I'd had a few hours with this book and a red pen before it went to press.  Aside from that, I do like the whimsicality of his choices and juxtapositions... last night I was intrigued by the description of Labyrinths, a short story collection by Jorge Luis Borges, then completely turned off as he summarized The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I never had to read either of these books in school, and none of the students I'm working with now have ever mentioned either one, but I certainly have heard of them both, and I'm glad to know more so I can make a decision about whether they are worth my time. Borges sounds like my kind of thing; Plath sounds like my kind of instrument of torture. I would rather read about badminton than subject myself to another narrative of madness at this point in my life, and the more effectively done, the less interested I am. But that's just me.

 I'm glad he included Sherman Alexie and Phillip K. Dick, too. From Alexie he chose Reservation Blues. I think you can't go wrong with this funny, honest, insightful Native American magical realist, but the one the kids are actually required to read is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is his YA novel. For Dick, he chose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, mainly, I think, so he could compare it to Bladerunner. I was glad to read that discussion, because I personally got so frustrated with the lack of relationship between the two that I ended up turning the movie off halfway through. But apparently that's just me. By the way, I've never had a student tell me that Philip K. Dick was required-- possibly because of his scatalogical name-- but I would make every highschooler read A Scanner Darkly, concluding with some kind of ceremony in memory of the author's list of drug abuse victims and any others the students or teacher knows. I've never seen the movie, but the book left me in tears as I remembered those I have lost.

 If you want to know more about any of these books, here are the links. You don't have to buy anything!