Question of the Month: What was the first book you really fell in love with?

The question of the month for July from Michael G D'Agostino at A Life Examined was as follows:

"What was the first book (or book series) you really fell in love with?"

I don’t’ fall in love with books, and hardly anything else either. Both love and hate are outside my normal range of feelings.  

I’ve been reading a Hell of a lot of books over the years. The first book series that I got really hooked on was The Hardy Boys.

This won’t get me much cred among the literature feinsmeckers, I know. The Hardy Boys is a crappy book series, written by ghost writers.  My excuse is that I was quite young, about 8 years old. I read all the Hardy books, there were about 70 of them at that time.  Then I had to continue with something else; western series, Maclean, Bagley, Forsythe and so on.

Then, when I was in high school, I discovered Dostoyevsky, which was really cool stuff. I read all his books that I could find, and even walked around half of St. Petersburg (Leningrad at that time) to visit Dostoyevsky’s apartment, which is now a museum.

In the recent years, I have found a new favorite author, the French rebel Michel Houellebecq. So that’s about where I am now.

(Picture taken some time ago in the mountains, trout fishing on a late night in June. The weather is good and it's time for vacation. So long.)