Recently I’ve been thinking about the first library I frequented when I was a kid: namely the bookshelf in the basement of my childhood home. There were books elsewhere in the house but the basement bookshelf held an especially eclectic mix of picture books, assorted novels, discarded textbooks, first free books of several encyclopedia sets and Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. Oh, and some MAD Magazines and maybe some old Chatelaines.

For some strange obsessive reason I’ve tried to recreate the contents of that bookshelf in my head. I certainly read enough of its books over and over again, because “back then” when school closed for the summer, so did the library. If you were lucky (and apparently, healthy), you might be gifted a brand-new book at the end of the school year for perfect attendance, or, maybe for some more scholarly achievement. That’s how Little Women came into my possession. But that book went to live in my room with the others that I could legitimately call MINE.

The first denizen of the shelf I remember was a worn-out copy of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. With an innate desire to be a completionist, it bothered me to no end that there was a Part One to that story “out there” that I would ultimately read out of order. I remember that the cover was ripped off that one and only Suess that we owned, so there was no flyleaf listing the other myriad books that the good Dr. had penned under Suess or Geisel or LeSeig. Those listings in the front of books or the mail-order forms at the end of paperbacks were the only Google I had to inform me back then of what I was missing.

When it came to the Nancy Drews or the Trixie Beldens, (I eschewed The Hardy Boys because: Hello? They were for boys!) the covers were intact along with numbered lists of all the books we didn’t own. Of the Nancies, I remember we had 1, 2, 8, 21, 22, 23, 32 and 43 and of the Trixies, only 1, 5, 9 & 13. Clearly, there were gaps in my chronology of both of these heroines that I fantasized about emulating. Unfortunately, for ten-to-twelve-year-old me, there were no murders or robberies or plots to kill me (that I knew of, even though, I was kind of nosey like Nancy-Trixie) that were readily available for me to solve. Instead I contented myself with reading about their smarts and their tenacity to get in and out of trouble AND save the cat/the day/the whole dang town. There were other incomplete collections on the shelves: those shunned Hardies, The Bobbsey Twins – who were actually two sets of sibling twins – Donna Parker and – for some anthropomorphic fun – a few Thornton W. Burgess books. For some reason, those last ones are the only ones I managed to keep. They live on a shelf in my basement.

I did try to revisit Nancy a year or two ago when the audiobook for The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew #1) read by Laura Linney appeared in the “now available” feed of my library app. Although Linney made it bearable, it was clear that the bloom was off the rose for me. The formulaic fiction reads like a soap-opera for kids, with the beginning of every chapter recapping what just happened one page ago. I was content to return to my adult crime solvers like Cormoran Strike, Robin Ellacott and, my new favorite, Armand Gamache.

I never did read all the books of any of those series. Once I discovered that the library had complete sets, I quickly tired of the repetitive antics of teenaged detectives. There were other great books on our shelf to read and re-read: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Also a series! Did you know?), Clarence the TV Dog (We did own the sequel to that!) and The House at Pooh Corner (also a number two book – I didn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh until I had kids of my own).

It’s nice to know that for some of these books, I CAN go back and read them and they hold up. And for others, like Miss Drew, I can be happy to just revisit her – and our old bookshelf – in my mind.