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The Reading Promise
Aug. 30th, 2011 08:36 pmGrowing up, reading aloud was what my family did together. Maybe some during the day when we were little, but always every evening after supper. Whoever was assigned to be the dishwasher of the evening could dictate the book, and everyone else would gather around to listen, doing crafts or artwork to keep the hands busy while the ears listened. After I went to bed, if I had nightmares, I would creep halfway down the stairs to listen to the comforting sound of my father’s voice, reading aloud to my mother. Though I know they read more, in my mind’s ear, it was always either Hornblower or the Dragonriders of Pern. As a family, though, the series we read over and over again were Swallows and Amazons, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings. The last, early enough that I experienced a brief burst in popularity with my fourth-grade classmates, when our teacher read Fellowship aloud to us and I was the only one who knew what happened next. Those memories are why I felt compelled to read this book.
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma This memoir comes from a young woman who made a promise with her father at about age 9: they would read together every night. At first, they planned to read for 100 nights, but as they reached that goal, they aimed for 1000 and then kept right on going. They read through Alice Ozma’s mother leaving, through her late high school drama evenings and her father’s larangytis, right through until she left for college. Alice Ozma (named, of course, for her father’s favorite storybook heroines) narrates the story. I’d heard a lot about this book, and was slightly disappointed that it spent more time talking about what was going on around the reading than discussing the books they read. There are quotes from the books heading the chapters, and a bibliography at the end, but this is more memoir than reading reflection. It’s enjoyable as a memoir, but I want you, Dear Reader, to be more prepared than I was for the actual content of this book. Ozma paints a glowing portrait of her father, so dedicated to reading to children that he would hide her in a sleeping bag under his desk at work if she claimed to be sick, so that he could still read to his classes at the school library where he worked. More heartbreaking was his early retirement, when his school board decided that library time should be mostly about learning to use computers, with not more than five to ten minutes spent being read to. I wish for every child to have as dedicated a read-toer as Ozma’s father.
Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma This memoir comes from a young woman who made a promise with her father at about age 9: they would read together every night. At first, they planned to read for 100 nights, but as they reached that goal, they aimed for 1000 and then kept right on going. They read through Alice Ozma’s mother leaving, through her late high school drama evenings and her father’s larangytis, right through until she left for college. Alice Ozma (named, of course, for her father’s favorite storybook heroines) narrates the story. I’d heard a lot about this book, and was slightly disappointed that it spent more time talking about what was going on around the reading than discussing the books they read. There are quotes from the books heading the chapters, and a bibliography at the end, but this is more memoir than reading reflection. It’s enjoyable as a memoir, but I want you, Dear Reader, to be more prepared than I was for the actual content of this book. Ozma paints a glowing portrait of her father, so dedicated to reading to children that he would hide her in a sleeping bag under his desk at work if she claimed to be sick, so that he could still read to his classes at the school library where he worked. More heartbreaking was his early retirement, when his school board decided that library time should be mostly about learning to use computers, with not more than five to ten minutes spent being read to. I wish for every child to have as dedicated a read-toer as Ozma’s father. Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich In this book, Erdrich, author of several authors focusing on Native Americans and prairie life, writes about the first year of her daughter’s life. Although she says the baby in the book is a composite of all three of her daughters, in the book it sounds like she is writing about the youngest of her three daughters. It’s poetic and reflective, honest about the difficulty of parenting a baby while at the same time stunningly beautiful. It doesn’t hurt that Erdrich lives in a cabin in the woods, and the baby’s stages are mixed in with large doses of the natural life outside their window and the woods through which they walk. She writes, as an example of the tough times, of how hard it is to keep a sense of self apart from the baby, how easy suicide seems after weeks of sleepless nights – only her self is so absorbed in the baby that she feels that she has no self of her own left to kill. On the plus side, she writes about breastfeeding, how many great romantic writers’ deep inarticulate longings were really for that feeling of unity and transcendence that breastfeeding brings. Despite the poetry and deep thoughts, the book is slim enough to get through easily, an important consideration for sleep-deprived new parents. The saddest part for me was knowing that the happy blended family described in this book fell apart just a few years later, giving the already fleeting pleasures of a baby and the changing of the seasons an even more ephemeral feeling. 
Sweater Quest by Adrienne Martini Martini’s last book, 
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin Is happiness really worth pursuing? Rubin decides that yes, it is. Her happiness affects her whole family’s happiness, and she doesn’t want the best years of her life to slip by without her being able to enjoy them. Happiness is quite a deep topic, but fortunately, Rubin puts in the heavy lifting on the philosophy reading end of things to produce a book that’s easy to read while covering a wide spectrum of ideas about happiness. She picks an overarching happiness-increasing goal and a handful of smaller goals for each month, and talks about what ideas are most effective and easiest to accomplish – two quite independent variables. A sampling of her ideas: declutter, exercise, be kind to her husband and children, spend money well, find and do what she really likes to do, find a spiritual guide, start a blog (after which the text includes comments from blog readers). This was both entertaining and thought-provoking.
The Passion of the Hausfrau by Nicole Chaison Chaison’s memoir of motherhood hits both the humor and the hurt of motherhood, told in text with comic-style illustrations in the margins. She talks about giving birth – once in a hospital utility closet and once in a feeding trough; about grocery shopping and Halloween costumes with children; about trying to maintain her relationship with her husband. But she also traces her journey to self-actualization, aligning her journey with those of the male and presumably childless heroes in the classics that fill her bookshelves. It’s this angle, I think, that got her a cover blurb from Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home, while less funny, also journeyed through the classics. Chaison’s version of motherhood requires large amounts of humor seasoned with profanity; for those of similar bent, this is well worth reading.
French Milk by Lucy Knisley This memoir in graphic form has been getting some good press. Knisley and her mother, both celebrating birthdays – 22 for Knisley and obviously older for her mother – decide to spend a month together in Paris. While there, they look at lots of art, do a fair amount of shopping, and eat lots and lots of good food. Some reviewers commented on the nuanced portrait of the mother-daughter relationship; I didn’t really notice this much. There was good commentary on the art, which I should have expected from someone enough into art to be drawing a memoir. Somehow I was surprised anyway. I was less surprised by the loving commentary on the food, given that the book is named for her love of the milk in France – many, many meals and snacks drawn out, with written descriptions. I put this in adult again because I wasn’t sure how many teens it would appeal to; the most graphic it gets in terms of actual sex or violence is a mention of missing her boyfriend with a drawing of a wrapped condom. There is also some humorous nudity in the art references, as Knisley talks about how tired she is of the female nude as a traditional art topic, showing a couple pages in a row full of sketches from museums. This is worth looking at for the lover of France or food.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi There are a lot of good comic books out there. And there’s a lot of good “contemporary women’s fiction,” aka book club books out there, with enough heft to carry over an hour or so discussion. This memoir fits nicely into both categories. Satrapi (five years older than me) tells a story of growing up in Iran in the 70s and 80s, moving from one repressive regime to another. The illustrations are very simple black and white, expressive and occasionally stunningly beautiful. The stark contrasts are especially telling as they illustrate the story of a girl learning that life isn’t black and white. Comic fans will probably already have read this. Everyone else should put it on their lists now.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
