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.