Growing up just outside of Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, my brother, David, and I had the treat of regularly visiting our grandparents on Barracks Road when Mom and Dad needed to come into the city. The house was always abuzz with activity: my grandfather rushing off to the hospital where he was a professor of pediatrics; my grandmother taking orders for floral arrangements that made her the talk of the town. Which often left the two of us to our own devices in a lofty old house with plenty to explore and an massive wooded lawn that was perfect for adventures.

One of the more extraordinary adventures came from an inconspicuous stack of colorful books sitting in a pile of random treasures on the creaky wooden bench at the bottom of the stairs. Each book was filled with the most wonderful illustrations of a slight, wiry little boy and his clever and comical dog who embarked together for destinations all over the world. We had stumbled upon The Adventures of Tintin. Unfortunately, these editions were all in French and it wasn't until our aunt from Geneva brought us some crisp new copies of Tintin (recently translated into American English) that the stories themselves finally came to light.

To this day, I can sit for hours on end, completely transfixed by the enthusiastic and raucous chapters about Captain Haddock, The Thomsons, Calculus, and the rest of the gang. My parents (both English teachers) attribute a lot of our early vocabulary lessons to the complex narratives and expressions we learned in the series. Tintin's creator, Hergé, had the seemingly innate ability to capture emotion and rich cultural history in a way that breathes new life into the story with each new read. And with such massive, global appeal, Tintin clearly resonates as much today as it did when the series was first published in the 1930s in Belgium.

Today marks Hergé's birth, one hundred years ago, and with appropriate timing, Steven Spielberg announced today that he'll bring Tintin to Hollywood for the first time. This new chapter comes on the heels of a popular tv show (that I followed avidly as a teenager), a centenary exhibit, and countless other tributes. But all the fanfare aside, I contend that it's the simple joy of an six-year-old reading about the adventures of an ingenious boy reporter and his snowy white dog that will personally remain the biggest chapter of them all.