A lot of books at bedtime
At the age of nine, Alice Ozma and her father, Jim, set themselves a challenge: he would read to her every day for 100 days. They started with The Tin Woodman of Oz and ended with Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days by Stephen Manes. The next morning, they celebrated completing the "Streak", as it would become known, with pancakes at their favourite diner near their home in Millville, New Jersey, on the US east coast. Then Alice suggested that they carry on for 1,000 nights.
The Streak took on even more importance once it was just Jim and Alice (her sister had left home). It could often be therapeutic - Jim used the Streak, writes Alice, "as a solution to a problem. It was something he did often, even if he wasn't doing it intentionally. After my mother moved out, we read stories about young girls without mothers. When there were bullies at school, we read about kids who outsmarted their nemeses rather than resorting to fistfights."
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