Sunday, May 29, 2011

My iPad and Alice Ozma's The Reading Promise

I made my usual Sunday morning stop at one of the Barnes & Noble stores in my area - I generally alternate between two B&Ns because I live pretty much equidistance between the two.  I looked all over the store for a book I remembered seeing a week or so ago in an email I received from B&N but could not remember the author or title of the book.  I remembered the cover in a vague sort of way and did know that it was nonfiction and what it was about.  I couldn't find it anywhere, however, and after finishing my other weekly book shopping, I chose a lucky salesclerk to ask for help.  (I felt a bit sorry for her since I could give her nothing firm to go on.)

We retraced some of my previous steps around the store before the woman noticed I was carrying my iPad under my right arm.  She suggested that I log onto the Barnes & Noble website to do a "key word search" for the book.  Sure enough, I typed in the words father daughter read and the number one choice was the book I wanted to find.  A quick double-click on the book icon gave us its ISBN number, after which we plugged that number into a B&N store computer to find its location in the store: the Biography section.

The clerk got to talking about reading e-books on the iPad since she owns one and her husband reads them from a Kindle.  She got a big kick out of finding the book with "Apple's help," a first for her, she said.  She will, of course, remain anonymous despite her extra effort to help me because she did not at all mind admitting that she is not a fan of the B&N Nook, much preferring the other two readers.

Now, let me tell you a little about this "hard-to-find" book.  It's a memoir (so why did I fail to look in the bio section?)  called The Reading Promise.  It was written by Alice Ozma, a young woman whose father read aloud to her every single night of her life from the time she was in the fourth grade until she left for college.  The original challenge was to make it through 100 consecutive nights; the reality was that they made it through 3,218 nightly readings.  I have to find out how they managed this seemingly impossible feat.

I'm going to cheat a little and start The Reading Promise relatively high up in my TBR stack instead of placing it at the very bottom where new books normally go - keep your fingers crossed that I'm not building my expectations up so high that no book could live up to them (a bad habit of mine).

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