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!
Hibernation feels very attractive!
ReplyDeleteThat frozen bird bath is a sure indication that an extra hour in bed is needed.
ReplyDeleteI did that same thing! Skipping over words and learning by context. Love the orange rose.
ReplyDeleteI never read any of the Hardy Boys but weren’t they a regular tv feature from Walt Disney? I do remember that the book covers did not look like cartoons.
ReplyDeleteApplause for the speedy production of this blogpost! Well done old chap!
ReplyDeleteI know of the Hardy Boys, but I don't know. I did the same with big words, understanding them from the context in which they were used.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever read The Three Investigators? I still have my original copies of them. Plus all my old Nancy Drews. I have no idea why other than they give me joy to look at.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reminding, I will rush outside and bring in our last (yellow) rose.
ReplyDeleteMust ask the daughter about the Hardy Boys, dimly remember her reading this.
You seem to have made more sense in 18 minutes than I make in an hour!! ;-)
ReplyDeleteI think you did a great job of writing with just 18 minutes! I loved the Hardy Boys as a kid. I would walk down to the library and check out a new one when I finished reading the previous book. I think reading those also helped me to improve my reading.
ReplyDeleteThe rose looks great. I think the Hardy Boys were boys' version of Nancy Drew. Really good mysteries for a kid. I think I got Carson some of those "younger" Hardy Boy books last year for his birthday but I'm not sure his reading was that good yet. I'll have to ask him if he ever read them and maybe try to get him to do it with me (and get his mind off the damn Minecraft game!)
ReplyDeleteI rarely spend that long on blogpost. Years of writing at top speed will do that. It's usually in my head just waiting to be entered.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever read the Hardy Boys. Are they mysteries? I'll check.
That should be called Hardy-Boys-lite.
ReplyDeleteSeeing that ice gave me a shiver. All the rain we've had has brought the temps down in the low 50's. That's pretty cool for us. I had to turn the heat on.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I read any Hardy Boys books but I did read some Nancy Drew.
I suppose I was a stereotypical girl, much preferring Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys. But I read anything I could get my hands on so I did read the ones that came my way.
ReplyDeleteDo you still have any of the native Floridian's thrill at seeing a solid block of ice formed by weather alone?
Excellent blog for eighteen minutes of writing!
We had similar childhoods though I'm sure when I read through them, there were well over a hundred of them by then, maybe closer to two hundred. I also read through the Nancy Drew series.
ReplyDeleteI read all of the Nancy Drew books and a few of the Hardy Boys books too as I loved mystery books. I still do!
ReplyDeleteI like that publishers try to update the books to find a new crop of readers. Why not?!
I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I loved series because I knew what I was getting, a well written, interesting book.
ReplyDeleteI loved The Hardy Boys - and Nancy Drew, and really any mystery series I could get my hands on.
ReplyDeleteI never read any of the Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys books ... I preferred the Black Stallion books! If it had a horse based theme ... I probably read it!
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