The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother’s home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a playmate, when my grandmother came down the flagstone path, a box in her hands, and announced, with an air of genial relief, “I’ve found your mother’s old Nancy Drews.” Warped and moldy, “The Bungalow Mystery,” on top of the box, appeared unpromising—and, at two hundred pages, long. But desperation will drive a child to great lengths. I began to read and, it now seems, didn’t look up for several years.Meghan O’Rourke, writing in The New Yorker.
Photo from here.
