The Hardy Boys of Summer

For a good long while now Eli has been floating through life without sticking his nose deep into a book. This is big news. The kid is an astonishing reader, in regard to fluency, speed, and depth of understanding. I have been amazed to watch him plow through what seems to be atleast half of our local libary's kid section. To give an idea of his efficiency- he once read The Two Towers from The Lord of the Rings in a weekend. Anyway- for a while now he has traded the novel for comic books. And he does devour quite a number of them, but we've seen more of him as he works his way through this break in his reading. I think it has something to do with the fact that his ability far outstrips his content comfort level. So on some unconcious level he has told himself to hold off until his social knowledge matches his reading skills. But I digress. As Eli has fished around, trying to find the next great book that will recapture his attention, Jon has not been shy about name dropping. What should I read? is almost always answered by Jon with....The Hardy Boys! Jon and Eli took a brief foray into the land of these dectective brothers a few years back, but since then Jon's old blue-covered hard backs have been sitting untouched on the shelf.

Recently Jon got more proactive and took them all off of the boys' shelf and stacked them up near Eli's old reading chair. And it worked, Eli dived in. He's read two since yesterday. After he finished one this morning he came up for a breath, and as is his custom, found a parent do to a little debriefing. We got to talking about the some of the old time language and had a little laugh over the frequent description of the Hardys' "stout friend Chet". Stout is used often. Poor Chet. Never smart, or handsome, or wily, just stout. And then Eli commented on how the boys often used radios to communicate, or even telegrams. This got us off on a thread about wondering if they were rewritten today (are they? Eli thinks there is a modern author who has taken up the tale) how things would be different. The Hardy's would email, facebook, text to solve their crimes. And then Eli was able to weave in other new trends by coming up with a plot that involved the Hardys twittering to solve the crime about how old Stout Chet was cheated out of his victory on The Biggest Loser. He just went off on this riff that pretty much smacked those Hardys right down into 2009- gave me a hearty chuckle. Love that kid.