Obligatory photo of the ultimate Participation trophy for the hurt fee-fees:

Circa 1978 or so, our teacher asked everyone who'd read it to raise their hand. I was the only boy who had.

When I was little it got stuck in my mind that Benny was missing a hand (because of that cover illustration) which made the first book a lot more engaging. Then I realized he had both hands and lost interest.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the original version of the book:

I have a team of prepubescent kids who I send out to do a lot of the legwork on these sorts of mysteries. They're really quite sharp, and have solved a number of real puzzlers for me in the past. I'm a bit worried now, though, as one of them disappeared months ago while investigating the Case of the Smuggler's Ruby,…

I'm trying to solve a caboose mystery myself right now. I keep making inquiries, and keep getting shut out. The investigation is ongoing.

I went to a YA author panel at a conference a couple of years ago where Kenneth Oppel (who wrote Airborn and This Dark Endeavor) said about authors and writing adults into the story: "You can't have a good adventure when the parents are around." He basically said that you either have to write them out completely…

I loved to pretend to survive outside and cook my own food (aka dig up wild onions), so I was really into the first book. The funny thing is that now I'm grown, I prefer if other people make dinner and I just sit around reading.

I was kind of obsessed with that book. I think kids find tremendous appeal in descriptions of processes. How I did this thing. And then how I did this thing.

Did anyone actually order books from the back of the books? Not from the tissue paper catalogue you submit to the teacher and wait 4-6 weeks for them to arrive. I mean the actual forms at the very end for books in the same series and other YA books Scholastic wanted to hawk.

During my Annie phase I once told my dad I wished I were an orphan. I was only four or five at the time, so I didn't totally understand what I was saying. But he got super sad.

Aren't nearly all of the great child literary protagonists either orphans or in some other way living without their parents (like the Pevensies or the kids from My Side of the Mountain or Hatchet)? I think there is just something tremendously appealing to a kid growing up in a relatively stable homelife to imagine the…

Yes, that was called the "Book-It Program", it's probably still in existence in some elementary school depending on whether Pizza Hut kept wanting the tax break.

When I was in elementary school, we had a reading program that basically told you "you read this many books in a month, we'll give you a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut." As if I needed more motivation to read books, because even as a young child I already had a voracious reading habit. I remember reading…

I legitimately wanted my parents to die because the Boxcar Children made it seem totally doable and hella fun.

Mark Twain had a great anecdote about telling stories on stage in Vermont. Through his whole act, the audience was obviously engaged, but silent. Nobody left early, but nobody reacted to his humor.

They were definitely written to be examples, sometimes explicitly so. In one book, they're introduced to a friend of their grandfather's, and when the adults need to talk alone, the kids immediately file out quietly and respectfully, which the friend remarks upon. That stuck with me - not because I followed their…

I worked in a bookstore not long ago and a ~12-14 year old girl came in looking for mystery young adult books that weren't lame (I forget how she phrased it but that was the gist) and the only thing I could come up with were these crusty old books like Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew. There are a few other newer ones…

I can express a year’s worth of anger in one understated, cutting remark during Thanksgiving dinner.

At least the Phantom Tollbooth had the good sense to name the watchdog Tock.