By Michael Dirda

Sunday, May 13, 2001; Page BW15

Once a month for a dozen years, I used to write about children's books -- guides to the constellations and pond life, oversized picture albums, illustrated biographies of Francis Drake, Marie Curie and Lewis Carroll, surveys of table utensils from around the world, a multi-volume history of the United States. I reviewed studies of children's counting games, fantasy novels for middle readers, and myriad collections of riddles, poetry and kitchen-science experiments, as well as an entire playground of titles by James Marshall, William Joyce, Maurice Sendak, Joan Aiken, Julius Lester, Jack Prelutsky, Leo and Diane Dillon and James Stevenson, to mention only some favorite rabble-rousers. My own children were young then. Like Santa Claus in a coat and tie, I toted bags of goodies home -- such bounty! I looked forward to 8:30 when I would hunker down against a bedside and read aloud to a freshly scrubbed 5-year-old in cowboy pajamas. The world never seemed better.

But those days, alas, are nearly over, and all their dizzying raptures. Now and again, I still pick up -- for my own pleasure -- a novel by Philip Pullman or Diana Wynne Jones, or flip back through William Joyce'szany A Day With Wilbur Robinson or Chris Van Allsburg's enigmatic The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, even reread some Daniel Pinkwater -- Author's Day, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death -- just for the sentences that make me laugh. In fact, I keep a few kids' books on my own over-crowded shelves -- the works of Russell Hoban, Beatrix Potter (next to Jane Austen), Philippa Pearce'selegiac time fantasy, Tom's Midnight Garden, Richard Kennedy's Collected Stories -- but it's pretty evident that any real pedagogic need for juvenile fiction and nonfiction is rapidly passing from the Dirda household. The youngest of my noisy offspring is going on 11, and in the last few months he has made the jump to light-speed and started to zoom through almost-grownup books on his own. So it goes: One day a child is painfully sounding out the sentences in Nancy Drew, the nextshe's mesmerized by Crime and Punishment.

I recognize that one should keep reading aloud to children, even to moody and belligerent adolescents, and I don't have any plans to stop completely. Still. Just the other evening, I began Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting with the 10-year-old Harry Potter look-alike. After only a few minutes of my usual velvety diction, my son grabbed his wire-rims from the bedstand, then the book from my hands. "Let me have it, Dad. Go away." It was an epiphany of sorts. My blue-eyed boy had grown into a Serious Reader and didn't really need me anymore. He had entered the Golden Age -- roughly 10 to 15 -- when printed matter becomes more real to us than at any other time of our lives, when no hours are so blessed as those spent alone with a book.

When we are young, the titles we lug home from the library act as fortunes, proffering hints about our destiny. We imagine lives as exciting as those of the Hardy Boys; we speculate that, with hard work or just the right exercises, we could transform ourselves into Cherry Ames, Student Nurse or Tarzan of the Apes; we think of finding a cure for cancer or a gigantic black pearl, of combatting eldritch monsters and constructing a space station. Once upon a time, and, as James Joyce would say, a very good time it was, I swept through an entire shelf of juvenile biographies -- from uplifting lives of Abraham Lincoln and Florence Nightingale to action-packed accounts of polar heroes and early frontiersmen. To this day, what little I know about the Western explorer after whom Pike's Peak is named derives from a sky-blue volume intended for 12-year-olds: Zeb Pike, Boy Mountaineer. I don't believe I've ever had any need to know more.

Aside from the libraries (school and public), the main engine of my childhood reading was the Tab Book Club. Each month, my elementary school classmates and I would receive a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. I remember buying Jim Kjelgard's Big Red and a thriller called Treasure at First Base, as well as Geoffrey Household's Mystery of the Spanish Cave. Exercising my usual discrimination, I found them all just great.

Alas, being thrifty, my mother would allow me to purchase only four Tab books each month, at 25 or 35 cents apiece. After our teacher sent in the class's order, several weeks would pass and I would almost, but not quite, forget which quartet of titles I had finally chosen. Then, in the middle of some dull afternoon, a teacher's aide would open the classroom door and silently drop off a big, heavily taped parcel. A murmur of anticipation would ripple among the students, and we would shuffle restively, hoping that Mr. Jackson would distribute the treasures that very day. Sometimes, groaning with disappointment, we would be made to wait, especially if the package was delivered close to 3 o'clock, when school let out.

Romantic poets sometimes lament that they can remember or intellectually appreciate the wonders of nature but no longer truly feel them as they had when young. So, too, I can tell, but never recreate, the sheer animal joy of receiving four bright new paperbacks, tight and sleek and shiny. At my old wooden desk, I would methodically study each title's artwork, read and reread the back cover, even check out the faint edge of glue at the top of the perfectly bound spines. I would then lean over to envy the volumes on my friends' desks. No rare first editions have ever been so carefully handled and so lovingly appreciated as those apparently ordinary book-club paperbacks.

Of all my childhood reading, though, one novel proved to be the silver key, the transitional book that finally led me into the adult section of the library. After The Hound of the Baskervilles, I was no longer a kid and might devour anything, from Agatha Christie mysteries to old bestsellers such as Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe and Thomas B. Costain's The Black Rose, or even the poetry of A.E. Housman and Robert Frost.

To this day, I recall the blurb in the Tab newsletter that so enthralled me. Beneath a small picture of the paperback cover, a Dell Mystery Library selection, were the words: What was this "thing that came out of the swamp at night to spread horror and violent murder over the moors"? What else, of course, but a hound from the very bowels of Hell? Eager as I was to start immediately on an almost irresistible treat, I decided to put off reading this adventure of Sherlock Holmes until I could do so under just the right conditions.

One Saturday in early November, my parents announced that they would be visiting relatives that evening with my sisters. Yes, I might stay home alone to read. The afternoon soon grew cloudy, gray skies threatening rain. With a dollar clutched in my fist, I dashed to Whalen's drugstore, where I bought two or three candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, a bottle of Orange Crush. After my family had driven off, I dragged down a blanket from my bed, spread it on the reclining chair next to a bright floor lamp, carefully arranged my sweets near to hand, turned off all the other house lights, and crawled expectantly under the covers with an emergency flashlight and my new paperback of The Hound -- just as the heavens began to boom with thunder and the rain to thump against the curtained windows.

In the lowering darkness, I read and read, more than a little scared, learning the origin of the terrible curse of the Baskervilles. At the end of Chapter Two, the tension escalated unbearably. Who among us can forget Dr. Mortimer's testimony? Holmes and Watson have just been told how the latest Baskerville has been found dead, apparently running away from the safety of his own house. Their informant pauses, then adds, hesitantly, that near the body he had spotted footprints on the damp ground. What kind? eagerly inquires the great detective. A man's or a woman's? To which question he receives perhaps the most famous answer in all the Sherlock Holmes canon, arguably in all 20th-century literature: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound." I shivered with fearful pleasure, scrunched further down under my thick blanket, and took another bite of my Baby Ruth, as happy as I will ever be.

I still have that Tab paperback, in remarkably good condition: After all, it was a book I've taken care of over the years. But it's probably now time to leave it out on a certain 10-year-old's pillow. I know just how he'll feel at the end of Chapter Two. •

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place on Thursdays at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.