I do not have much experience with young adult literature, especially the kind peddled by the Syndicate. I had never in my life read Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, and I had not even heard of Tom Swift. To get myself into the right mindset for this game, I selected two of his stories to read: his first Hardy Boys mystery, The Ghost at Skeleton Rock (1957), as well as his first published novel, Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster (1954). Both books were better than I expected and the Tom Swift book blew me away, actually good enough that I wished I had discovered them when I was younger. No wonder he was picked up to lead the series! I wrote up brief bonus reviews on both of them if you click the links above. I love that the Tom Swift stories paint ingenuity and science as core American virtues; the stories are a product of the 1950s and the cold war, but it would be nice to think of science as a core American value again.