I went through a mystery novel phase between the ages of six and nine.  Someone gave me the first six Nancy Drew books in a boxed set, and she was my favourite of favourites for a long time.  I used to love going to the library booksale every November, where I could buy a box of ten old books for less than a toonie.  It wasn’t long before I acquired almost the whole (ridiculously expansive) collection of Nancy Drew books, as well as some other lesser known teen-girl-detective books like Trixie Belden and Herculia Jones.  My favourite Nancy Drew books were the ones in which Nancy fainted at some point in the story (which is a hilariously high percentage of the books); I’m not quite sure what that says about the type of child I was.

Sidenote: I was just trying to find the title of another series I vaguely remember and stumbled across this very interesting article about how positively dated the original Nancy Drew books were in terms of social and political correctness.  I guess that wasn’t really something I was thinking about when I was seven.

I have several very clear memories from my mystery-binge era.  I remember Trixie finding a locket (or perhaps an earring?) in a lawn full of clover.  I remember feeling righteously furious at whoever wrote on the back of a Herculia Jones book “look out Nancy Drew, Herculia Jones is coming through”.  Almost as angry as I feel now when I hear anyone say “this will be the next Harry Potter”.

One memory has given me the rather interesting realization that I was reading full novels and somehow understanding them before I even knew what a sentence was.  I had been reading, unsurprisingly, when my best friend and her mom came over to visit, and my mom suggested that we go up to my room and read together; “Take turns reading sentences,” was what she said.  When we got up to my room and jumped on my bed, we had to figure out what she had meant by “sentences” and I decided that a sentence simply meant three words.  So we read three words at a time, back and forth, until my friend got bored.  Incidentally, the book we were reading was of the series I can’t remember the title too, though I’m about 99.9% certain that the protagonist’s first name was Arizona… if anyone feels like going on a book hunt for me?

I remember my mom getting a very battered copy of Sherlock Holmes from the library for me on the grounds that I liked mysteries, but I stopped reading it after the first couple of pages because I wasn’t quite ready for literature-level murder mysteries at the age of eight.

Through these girl-detective books I learned words like “sleuth” and “blazer” (improperly: in my imagination Nancy went around wearing neon-bright sweaters!).  I learned that fainting is a fact of life and mysteries always have a simple and logical answer that is usually obvious from the get-go.  In short, I didn’t really learn anything at all.  I started to lose interest in the genre when I noticed I could predict the ending of the books from the first couple of chapters–probably less because I was some kind of prodigy and more because they all had pretty similar and clear-cut solutions.  I was catapulted out of this phase of my life as a reader when my dad bought me the first Harry Potter book for Christmas when I was eight–out of the mystery phase and straight into the fantasy world I have lived in to this day, where I probably will stay for the rest of my life!

What sort of reading did you get up to when you were a kid?  Did you go through distinct genre phases?  Can you remember the first book that gave you very strong opinions about something?  Which books triggered your changes in taste?