The best part of Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise is the list of books at the back. Including all the L. Frank Baum, Judy Blume, Ramona (Beverly Cleary), Harry Potter, and Encyclopedia Brown (Sobol) books, most of Charles Dickens, and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe – the list also suggests the following classics:

• The Secret Garden
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• James and the Giant Peach
• Because of Winn-Dixie
• Hoot
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Giver
• Winnie-the-Pooh
• Island of the Blue Dolphns
• The Great Gilly Hopkins
• Maniac Magee
• Dicey’s Song
• The Pigman

Ozma offers seven pages of titles – all read to her  by her father as they used nightly reading for father/daughter bonding in a mutual promise to maintain an eight year “streak” of uninterrupted nights of reading.   The book is a stretched out and unremarkable memoir, but the list is a nice reference, if you need one.