Oh, I forgot about those, there had to be over a dozen Readers Digest condensed books.
Could have been worse: Dr. Krafft-Ebing instead of Dr. Westheimer or Dr. Reuben.
It was that, combined with a desire to cure my uncle’s schizophrenia, that sparked my own interest in psychology. A lot of things changed my mind, but I ended up marrying a psychologist, so at least I get to have interesting discussions.
Other than those two books and the entire Nancy Drew collection, my Mom wasn’t much of a reader. My bio father had stacks and stacks of old Reader’s Digests and I read so many.
We had hundreds! And when they died, no one would take them! No libraries, no schools, no nursing homes. Recyclers didn’t want them either, due to the binding and glue. Landfills didn’t want them. I ended up burning them, and they didn’t burn real good either.
My mom had Sybil too! I read it many times. Later, of course, I found out it was a load of bull, but my mind had already been warped.
The mentions of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books reminded me that my paternal grandmother had a bookcase, which was probably 90% filled with those. IIRC, Reader’s Digest issued four of those per year, and she must have had 15 to 20 years’ worth of them. (The rest of her bookcase had trashy romance novels, as I remember it.)
My maternal grandparents had a bookcase, too, which was entirely filled with old issues of National Geographic magazine.
My grandmother had a Time-Life book called Mysteries of the Unexplained. It had some perfectly valid weirdness (accounts of ball lightning, for example) along with complete BS (Bigfoot sightings, spontaneous combustion.) That book freaked me out so much! After I became an adult she offered me the book and I gladly took it.
My parents were both elementary school teachers. We had a ton of reference books, including two full sets of encyclopedias. But, as others have mentioned, we also had a bunch of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and I read every single one of them, some multiple times.
They all went to the landfill when my folks moved and downsized.
I don’t remember my dad reading books much, usually magazines instead (Newsweek, Business Week, stuff like that). In fact, the only book I actually remember him reading was “Jaws” when it came out. Mom read a lot but generally got books from the library. We didn’t have bookshelves, but there were a few paperbacks here and there around the house. Usually popular bestsellers like The Godfather or The Exorcist.
My mom was quite the reader. Did the Great Books thing w/ Chicago Public Libraries twice. I have her set of Trollope’s Barchester novels, b/c one of them was on her nightstand the day she didn’t wake up.
My dad, not so much. But he worked for printers all of my youth, so he was always bringing home tons of books. We had hundreds of kids’ books, including all of Seuss. But he did not print so many adult books. Mainly textbooks, maps, encyclopedias… In HS, had the teacher’s version of most textbooks. God, did we have a lot of maps, atlases…
Seven Days in May was another one. We had the Funk & Wagnalls complete set & years books too.
My parents had another smaller shelving unit for paperbacks, but those would rotate in and out to the used bookstore.
I grew up in the 50s/60s. A lot of the books in our bookcase had belonged to my sister, so there were a lot of dog and horse novels like “Lad, A Dog” and the like, which I read. There was also a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and a set more geared to kids called “The Book of Knowledge”. I used to read those quite a bit. Then there were the Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. I read all of H. Ryder Haggard’s novels from those. There was a set of James Whitcomb Riley poems, copyrighted 1910, that belonged to my mother from when she was a young girl, and a very old illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland; the photos in that one were taken from a very old stage performance. I had my own books about astronomy and dinosaurs, etc., along with Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novels, after that came my science fiction phase that included a lot of Asimov, Bradbury, etc.
When I was a teen, a friend of the family decided to get rid of his fairly substantial library and my mother and I got first pick. I grabbed Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and some other weighty tomes.
My father loves science fiction and reads that almost exclusively. I have read the older classics and like them, but don’t read this genre very often at all. Growing up, I spent a significant chunk of money earned in various jobs on used books of every type. Years later, this is still the case. I always bought what appealed to me if it was easily affordable at the time, and it did not match parental preferences.
I was grown up before Everything you Wanted to Know … was published. If they had sex books they weren’t out - and they weren’t with the dirty playing cards.
My parents had a complete set of Mark Twain in nice bindings, some of which I read, and a complete set of Dickens, which I didn’t. I did read my father’s “Sad Sack” cartoons about a GI in WW II.
They had a memorial paperback published when FDR died and a book called Heavenly Discourses, a set of satirical pieces written after WW I in which famous dead people, like Robert Ingersoll, argued with God. The piece I remember was when the preacher Billy Sunday died. God sent him to monkey heaven. The monkeys protested because he was too loud.
My mother had a collection of stories from Frederik Pohl and another from Robert Bloch which I swiped and still have.
My parents had the standard 1960s bestsellers: Michener, Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, etc. There were some hardcovers, which were mostly book club editions—they must have belonged to the Book of the Month Club at some point, although I don’t remember any books arriving in the mail. There were also lots of paperbacks, which were generally in horrible shape; my parents treated paperback books as disposable, and ridiculed my efforts to keep my SF book collection in pristine condition. The hardcovers were displayed on the living room bookshelf, while the beat-up paperbacks were stuffed away in a cabinet along with the Herb Alpert and Jackie Gleason LPs.
The only book from my parents’ collection that I read was Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, which I read after watching the movie on TV. Pretty good book, but it didn’t motivate me to seek out Wouk’s other stuff.
Of course, there were also a few Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. The only thing I read from those was Night of Camp David, a thriller about a U.S. president being mentally unstable. I’ve been thinking about that book lately.
Tons of sci fi from my dad, my mom read a lot of romance novels.
Many of them I don’t even remember any longer, lots of Del Rey paperbacks with a cook space scene on the front. But, I know there was definitely Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov
My father enjoyed a variety of books, from John LaCarre spy novels to newspaper columnists Art Buchwald and Jimmy Breslin, political biographies, and he was particularly fond of humorists Harry Golden and P.G. Wodehouse.
My mother was into mysteries, especially Agatha Christie.