My Sky Blue Trades, Sven Birkerts

And then, one afternoon, kneeling down in a new section, I pulled out a book called The Tower Treasure, one of the very first in the Hardy Boys series. And with that began a reading obsession that lasted right into the early sixth grade. I read and reread the books — there were forty-some, I think. I borrowed them from the library, requested them as gifts, used allowance money to buy them; I even asked my mother to drop me off at the Birmingham bookshop whenever she went into town to do errands. There I would stand in place and read, knocking off forty or fifty pages at a stretch, dreading the shoulder tap that would mean it was time to go.

The Hardy Boys series gave me a complete and ongoing world — a world of danger and intrigue offset by what I now see as the cliches of cheery home life, but which then seemed the essence of what I wanted. Their town, Bayport, managed to condense the whole voluptuous larger universe, complete with gangsters, police, shady establishments, boathouses, deserted farmsteads, warehouses, train stations, wilds of all descriptions — everything, in short, required for every imaginable adventure. I entered in a state of joyous trepidation. To have one of the books under way, safely secreted on the shelf by my bed, was to have a validated ticket to immunity. Then it did not matter in the least if I was passed over for some playground team or whether my father came roaring up the driveway in one of his moods. It did not even matter that, catching sight of me propped on a pillow in my bed, he sent me out into the yard with a rake or clippers or some other instrument of manual repetition. I had only to think of my book, the marker like a signpost showing me the road back in, and I would feel safe.

My absorption into the world of Frank and Joe Hardy bled into my daily life as no reading experience has since, not quite. When I now read of others growing up with loftier excitements — those mythic schoolboys devouring their Dickens or Scott or Kipling — I feel slightly chagrined. But the fact is that I don't know if I could have hurled myself into those other imagined worlds in the same way. Part of my Hardy Boys obsession had to do with my susceptibility to renderings of American boyhoods (I also loved Penrod, Tom Sawyer, A Separate Peace). I was drawn by the mysteries, of course. But I was no less deeply compelled by the settings, the images I derived of an ideal boy-world. I loved the idea of these brothers with their lightly ribbing loyalty, their constant interactions with their buddies — “chums” — the extraordinary freedom with which they went about their complicated and endlessly exciting business. Nothing could have been more different from how I lived.

My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter In A Contrary Time, 
Sven Birkerts