Father-Daughter Reading

I recently read a New York Times article titled "A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page" (March 21, 2010; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/fashion/21GenB.html), which described a father and daughter who often read together, and decided when she was in fourth grade to read together for 100 straight bedtimes. When they finished those 100 evenings of reading, they decided to keep going to 1,000, and finally kept going for 3,218 nights (over nine years), until the daughter's first day of college. Even when the father, Jim Brozina, was traveling, he would read to his daughter Kristen on the phone. They called their extended nightly reading "The Streak." Jim is a single father, so reading together was a special bond that helped keep him and Kristen going through the sad times of the leaving of Kristen's mother, the death of her grandparents, and her seven-year-older sister's going off to college. Kristen says, "The Streak was stability when everything else was unstable." Kristen and her father began The Streak with "The Tin Woodman of Oz," progressed through other children's books to Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, Dickens, and Shakespeare, ending by circling back to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" on Kristen's first day at college. Jim has built a collection of over 700 of the books he and Kristen read together, and will pass them down to her to read to her own children. I love this story, as it embodies the wonderful experience, connection, continuity, and comfort that parents reading with their children can provide. As I am sure many of you do, I have fond memories of my parents' reading to me, and equally fond memories of my reading to my own daughter. And there is no better way to launch a child on a lifetime of reading. Here's to Jim and Kristen Brozina for their inspiring and touching story!