Vacation + Mystery Books + Books

I’ve been back in my apartment for over 48 hours now and I have managed not to do the dishes. I started twice and then got sidetracked by other things, like food. I did manage to unpack, meaning that I emptied my suitcase and put all the extra blankets back inside and stuffed it back into storage. And the vacation clothes that were in the suitcase are now sitting in a laundry basket waiting to be put back into their proper containers.

It was nice to go home again, I hadn’t been there for a while so a lot of things have changed and at the same time, not a lot has changed. That doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s how I feel. The library that I went to almost every weekend in elementary school is gone. That made me kind of sad, but it’s a park now, so I guess that’s good. I used to spend ages in the basement, where the kid’s section was, and troll the aisles looking for new books from my favorite authors. I loved mysteries. My favorites were:

• Cam, the girl with the photographic memory
• Encyclopedia Brown
• E. W. Hildick– I just looked him up to make sure I spelled his name correctly and found out that he died in 2001. He was born in 1925. I loved his mysteries. He wrote a series about group of kids that solved mysteries, and I can’t even remember their names or any of the plots, but I loved them. The first book was “The Nose Knows” I remember that title. It was published in 1974. There were 24 books in that series and the last one was published in 1996, which means that there are still some mysteries that I have not read. I will have to check out the library. Thanks to wikipedia I just found out that he wrote a few other mystery series as well.

I also loved:

• The Babysitters Club– I was probably obsessed with this series. I bought the first 6 I think and then it started going downhill. I used to love the monthly book order from Apple Scholastic.
• The Girls of Canby Hall– another obsession. I was sad when this ended, I think this was around junior high when I started reading these.
• Some series about ballet dancers, I can’t remember the name but I think it was cancelled before the series got resolved and that pissed me off. A lot. This was probably also in my junior high days. It bugs me that I cannot remember the name of the series, but I can picture the book covers in my mind.
• Nancy Drew
• Judy Blume– Superfudge and Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing were my favorites.
• Gordon Korman– The MacDonald Hall series and then in high school I loved/was obsessed with Don’t Care High, A Semester In The Life of A Garbage Bag. I loved the ridiculousness of the plots, ridiculous in a highly entertaining fashion, so funny. No Coins, Please and I Want To Go Home are perhaps my all-time Gordon Korman favorites. So much fun. Oh- an Our Man Weston. I rememeber it took me a while to get around to reading that one, I wasn’t too keen on it at first, but I loved it, and read it, and all the others many, many times.

When I was younger I would read all those books over and over again and not be bored of them, and now I hardly ever read books twice. There are some books that I do read again, and books that I will read again, but the percentage of re-reads is much lower now as an adult than as a child. Interesting.