A Very Quick Discission of the Hardy Boys

I'm not sure how this happened, but it is somehow already 7:34 a.m. as I write this, and I have to leave at 8 a.m. to get to work on time. So blogging today will have to be speedy! Clearly I overslept, partly because Dave isn't feeling well and plans to stay home, so I didn't have the benefit of his alarm going off at 5:45 a.m. (Though usually I wake up naturally earlier than this.)

Maybe the cold weather has activated my hibernating instincts. That's our birdbath (above) yesterday morning -- a solid block of ice.

Work was pretty slow yesterday. The Model United Nations group has been holding a mini-conference in the library in the afternoons with students from other London schools. It means a lot of people and a lot of activity, but there's not a lot for me to do -- none of them are really using library resources, just the space. So I mostly wind up hanging out. I did work on gathering our monthly usage statistics yesterday and filling out that spreadsheet, so at least I had a task to work on in the background.

I came across the book above in the Lower School and sent it to my brother with the caption, "The world is going down the toilet!" The Hardy Boys, in my day, were relatively sophisticated mystery books, or at least that's how I remember them. They were not skinny paperbacks of cartoon characters worrying about zombies.

But...this prompted me to read about the history of the Hardy Boys books on Wikipedia, which brought the revelation that the books were actually shortened and rewritten even before I was a child, to compete with television and "dwindling attention spans." (And to remove offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes.) So I can hardly claim to be a Hardy Boys originalist, though I think I did read some of the originals when I found my uncle's old copies at my grandmother's house in Maryland.

I loved Hardy Boys books when I was young. I read dozens of them. They practically taught me to read. I specifically remember developing the skill of skipping over words I didn't know and then surmising the meaning based on the context. I taught myself a lot of words that way.

To be fair, the book above is actually a special Hardy Boys offshoot series targeted toward younger readers, featuring Frank and Joe Hardy in grade school. So it's not representative of the state of the franchise as a whole, though I'm not sure how well read the series is these days. We have some in our library and they rarely get used.

I did bring in that orange rose to save it from the freeze. I'm appreciating it a lot more on our kitchen windowsill than I would be outdoors!

And with that, I'm off to work -- at 7:52 a.m. Not a bad blog post for eighteen minutes of writing!