It was the father who read and the daughter who listened. They did not keep an ongoing record of their choices, but a list of the books they can remember reading is included at the back of “The Reading Promise,” along with a form that readers can use to make a reading promise of their own. They read writers from Lewis Carroll to Judy Blume to Shakespeare to Agatha Christie to J.K. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the source of “Ozma” in the author’s pen name. They covered a lot of literary territory but returned often to such favorites as L. If Ozma spent a night at a friend’s house, her father called her up and read to her over the telephone. As Brozina writes in his foreword to “The Reading Promise”: “Once started, a reading streak can be a hard thing to stop.” Faithfully, even obsessively, they read together for at least 10 minutes every night for nine years.
They kept that promise from the time Ozma was 9 years old until the day she went to college at 18. Jim Brozina, “an eccentric and excitable children’s librarian,” and his daughter, Alice Ozma, made a vow to read together daily.
“THE READING PROMISE: My Father and the Books We Shared,” by Alice Ozma (Grand Central.
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