A Father Reads to His Daughter for 3,218 Nights in a Row

(6 copies in LINKcat, 40 holds)

A Promise Well Kept. (New Jersey Monthly, 4/11/2011)

Excerpt: When Alice Ozma was nine, her dad started reading to her. He’d read to her before, but on this occasion they agreed to try for 100 days straight.

The 100 days turned into 3,218. Ozma’s father, a children’s librarian for more than 30 years in the Cumberland County town of Millville, read to her every night without fail until the day before she went to college.

This blitz of reading became the subject of Ozma’s book, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared (Grand Central Publishing, $24.99). The streak began and ended with books from L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series and included Alice in Wonderland, Great Expectations and 18 books from the Encyclopedia Brown series.

“It gave me a better understanding of what he was doing with his life,” says Ozma. “As a children’s librarian, that was always his passion. It was the other kid.”

Ozma, 23, didn’t think it odd that her dad read to her even when she was a teenager, although others might. Sometimes he would even read to her in public places, like the time they were waiting for her sister’s train in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. With time to kill, he opened Harry Potter.


From the New York Times, 3/18/2010:  A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page.