The father-daughter reading habit that lasted nearly a decade

This is too good to overlook: an inspiring story of a nightly habit that became a tradition, courtesy NPR:

When Alice Ozma was in the fourth grade, her family was going through a rough patch. Her parents had just split up, and her older sister had recently left for college. Ozma was suddenly spending a lot more time alone with her dad, Jim Brozina, an elementary school librarian. So Ozma and her father made a pledge: to read together every single night for 100 days.

But after 100 days, they just kept going. Their streak ultimately lasted 3,218 days — spanning from Ozma’s fourth-grade year to her first day of college. Their commitment to reading and to each other are the subject of Ozma’s debut book, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared. Brozina and Ozma join NPR’s Scott Simon to talk about what kept their “Reading Streak” alive.

The nightly reads quickly became habit, Ozma explains. “I think that once you start something like that, it’s very difficult to stop; it seems very weird after 100 nights of reading in a row to say, ‘Let’s not read tonight.’ ”

The streak was a source of stability for the pair through difficult times. “I did everything I could to make things be as comfortable as possible,” Brozina says. “We went through a very rough patch for a few years … it was almost scary, the situation we were in financially.”

Reading together was one thing they knew they could depend on.

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