Nancy Drew Books

First created on Jan 2006.

Nancy Drew

For nostalgia reasons, I decided to read all the Nancy Drew stories that I missed when young. I thought I would start with the best 10 ND stories, so I searched online for such a list. To my surprise, I can only find them on Amazon. I started borrowing based on the lists, but it turned out much easier to just borrow any ND book in sight. Hence, I'm on a quest to read all the ND books from the original series and come up with my own list of the best 10 ND stories. I hope to find some ND stories that would still be enjoyable to me as an adult, but so far I've been disappointed.

It takes me about 50 minutes to finish one story. Luckily, my library had a double-your-borrowing promotion (8 books instead of 4). This is good because it meant I have to go to the library only every 3-4 days, instead of 1-2.

A few things I learnt:

• Nancy Drew was first written in 1930! I knew they were old, but I didn't expect them to be so old!
• The reason is that the first 34 stories were revised in the '60s to bring them up-to-date. Luckily Applewoods now reprints the originals (their slogan: "Just As You Remember Them") and I intend to read them to finally experience the real Nancy Drew stories.
• The author, Carolyn Keene, is just a cover name. The stories are written by ghostwriters. I was slightly disappointed to hear that, but the silver lining is that the original author, Mildred A. Wirt, wrote 23 out of the first 30 stories.
• Only one book was released every year, at least for the original series.

Note: only the first 56 books are considered to be the original series, but I included 64 in my list. This is purely because they are in the same yellow hard-cover format.

List of Nancy Drew books that I've read.

Original Series

Notes

All images are taken from Amazon or other websites without permission.

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