Nancy Drew, Sotomayor and me: Lessons learned from the teen sleuth can carry into adulthood

As Judge Sonia Sotomayor's professional and personal lives are combed for clues in advance of her hearing for a Supreme Court justice slot, one juicy tidbit stands out for me:

Sotomayor is part of the Nancy Drew Sisterhood.

She recently recalled her mother stretching a single-parent budget to buy her Nancy Drew mysteries, "because she saw how I was enamored with them. I had like two shelves of them before I turned to other reading."

Your honor, I confess! I'm part of the Sisterhood, too! So are Sandra Day O'Connor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laura Bush and countless other estimable women.

Some of us haven't picked up a Nancy Drew novel (by various ghostwriters, under the pen name Carolyn Keene) for eons. Nor have we played the related computer games, seen the film or TV spinoffs, nor scanned feminist treatises about the amateur sleuth.

All we know is, Nancy rocks! And she has since 1930, when her first breezy-yet-suspenseful caper ("The Secret of the Old Clock") was published.

These whodunits have been steadily gobbled up by several generations of bright little girls (more than 100 million copies sold, in 20-plus languages). And the fictional heroine appears with the boy-sleuth Hardy Boys in the new play "Nancy, Frank and Joe."

I first stumbled across the Nancy Drew series at age 8 or 9. Some neighbors had an old trunk (yup) filled with first editions of the early books — "The Clue in the Diary," "The Hidden Staircase," et al — which I greedily borrowed and devoured.

Those 1930s and '40s relics might today seem formulaic, clumsily plotted and filled with ethnic stereotypes (corrected in later reprints).

But some of what I gleaned from their pages has served me well.

Lesson 1: Always read books with a dictionary at hand.

Nancy drove a "roadster." She got dolled up in a "frock." She described a woman with red locks as "titian-haired." Say, what? The original books are a trove of extinct Jazz Age-y slang, which I eagerly looked up in Webster's. (It was a good warm-up for reading James Joyce, much later.)

Lesson 2: Life is swell if you have your own car, spunky friends and lots of free time.