The first of the flash reviews

671338_14461703I’ve been meaning to catch up on some reviewing backlog, because the to-be-reviewed pile doesn’t seem to be  going down. I was saving some books for thematic reviews but the stacks have been driving me crazy, and  I’m way off my target for this year, hence I’ve decided to write some flash reviews for the quick reads.

Here’s how it works: I give a summary of the book, my take on it, plus a rating.

Deep breath. Here goes:

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The Three Investigators

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Three Investigators endpapers, photo from www.empireonline.com

I just finished reading a 3-in-1 Three Investigators book containing The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints, The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon and The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (books 86-88 of 2009)

Before I even started reading Nancy Drew, I was hooked on the The Three Investigators series, because it was my older sister’s (Tattie’s) favorite series when she was in grade school and she always talked about it.

As soon as I had access to the bigger library (4th grade), I found a whole shelf of the books and I didn’t even have any competition – nobody was checking them out! Nobody my age had even heard about them – the last borrowers were a good five years or so back – and so I was able to read them in order.

I was hooked, and I ended up checking out two or three of them at a time (three was the maximum number we could check out at one time at the library, and I was one of the few girls who were pushing the limit and filling up back to back blue borrower’s cards).

In fact, I ended up reading so many them that my mom had to curtail my reading time to half an hour a night (depending on her mood) and only after I did my homework (and then eventually I was limited to reading ONLY during the weekends; I had a reading ban on weeknights while the rest of my siblings got TV ban and I couldn’t have cared less about the TV). This is, I think, the reason I learned to read fast (and read on a moving vehicle on the way to and from school), to maximize reading time.

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