The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

76 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 whimsical journey of a prince and princess or the always entertaining conundrum of an animal. It was quite another thing when I first stepped into elementary and began to assemble the literary bricks constructed in my preschool years. I was no longer concerned with the band of misfit mammals searching for some insignificant trinket. No sir, it was time to read of daring escapes, lost treasure, and the quest of the amateur sleuth. None exemplified these traits better than the Hardy Boys. Now possessing the traits needed for reading on my own, I began a crusade of conquering one book after another. The lazy boy chair that used to hold my grandma became my own little world of mystery and intrigue. “Chet, one your bills is a counterfeit.” “Counterfeit? That’s impossible?” I wondered. “No way Chet’s bill is fake. Where did it come from? How did he have it? Was it the man they ran into earlier? It had to have been him.” Through each installation of the Hardy Boys, I found myself immersed in the dimly lit caves, I could hear the thief searching for the lads as they held their collective breath, and I felt the angst of their dire circumstances. Middle school, by contrast, was uninteresting concerning reading, and that’s speaking in kind terms. Yes, I read, but nothing grand stuck out to me like Cook-A-Doodle-Doo had before school or Hardy Boys had in elementary. It was just average, ordinary reading that simply didn’t do it for me. Though I panned the shelves of our middle school selections looking hopefully for something to break the tedium, my endeavors were for naught. All that was available was a repetitious assemblage of prosaic, banal literature that had swiftly perished upon its entry into the literary world. One particularly droll literary indiscretion came in the form of a book called Mystery at Inn Number 31, New Inn, though the true mystery was how the publisher thought it well and good to release such a lackluster, monotonous work as this. “In the form of Sherlock Holmes,” the review read. Realistically, a better summary would have been, “Dr. Jekyll Takes a Sedative,” or “Ennui and Insouciance.” Had the author thought it best to prep his readers for a real literary treat only to craft a sleeping aide? After several muddled paragraphs of mundane medical malpractice, I found myself reaching for a copy of my father’s quarterly statistical reports in order to spice up the reading for a spell. A typical reading of New Inn followed a general form: