Sesame Street in its earliest and most creative years, age 3*.
Star Wars, age 8.
Lord of the Rings, age 12.
The Young Ones, age 13.
*I kept watching until age 15.
Pern, in junior high.
The Hobbit, at age 7. Just perfect. Incidentally, reading The Hobbit at 7 ruined LOTR for me, because I read those at 8 and I wasn’t quite ready and didn’t really get them.
Rubber Soul, age 10
To Kill a Mockingbird, age 13
Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull, age 14
LOTR, age 15
The Dharma Bums, age 16
In Watermelon Sugar, age 17
I can’t evaluate any of these with the eyes/ears of a 55 year old. They will always be frozen in time and more or less perfect.
The Hobbit was required reading when I was in the 7th grade. I’d never read it before then, and it just swept me away. I didn’t know fiction could be that…epic.
A few years before that, I read a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. I don’t recall exactly HOW I got my copy of it. I always loved reading, but my parents never gave me anything more brain-teasing than Encyclopedia Brown or Trixie Belden. But that book also opened doors in my mind that I didn’t know existed.
I’ll also second reading Harry Potter for the first time in (I think…) early high school.
I grew up while Harry did.
On the Road and The Dharma Bums at the age of 20. I’ve tried to read them at the age of 35 and I just couldn’t get into it.
Nevermind and Ten came out when I was 12 and 13. I also first got MTV at my house at that time.
I have friends who are slightly older and slightly younger and they never “got” grunge. For me, it was right in my wheelhouse. Previous to that, I had been listening exclusively to The Beatles.
Michael Moorcock’s “Elric” stories. Junior high school.
Elric is a brooding, troubled soul, misunderstood and persecuted by the world. He wants to do good, but circumstances beyond his control always compel him to do evil. The Universe always conspires to wreck his happiness.
In other words, he is the patron saint of whiny teenagers.
On The Road at age 15, long before Kerouac was well known. I enjoyed it so much I read everything else of his I could get my hands on.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, same age, after reading a review of it. Ditto for Tom Wolf.
I am somewhat amazed that these two writers would both become American icons.
I read The Drifters by James Michener at age 18 and it pretty much set the tone for my life in my 20’s- traveling, meeting people, and partying.
I’m surprised so many of you read Rand in your teens. I didn’t get to her until my 20’s. I wonder what my next great novel will be. I’ll be 35 in August and I’m starting a new venture so I’m ripe to read something great.
Piers Anthony’s **Xanth **books, around age 10. They’re pretty much unreadable past adolescence, but that was the perfect age to be enchanted by punnery.
The Last Herald Mage trilogy as a teenager. I still love them, but might have been put off (as so many are) by the “magical white horsey” thing had I read them later. I think they were also the first books I read with a gay hero, which made me feel quite worldly at the time.
The Mists of Avalon, first read as a teen, and nearly every year since. It’s always the perfect age, but I get something different out of it every time. When I was younger, I read it for the feminist revision of Arthurian legend. Then it became a primer for Earth based religions. Later, I read it for the socio-politic ramifications of competing religions and changing society. Even later, I appreciated the idea that the religions aren’t actually competing, but each hidden within the other.
Clerks, which came out when I was in my early 20’s and working at a video store trying to figure out the meaning of life and why everything was so sucky.
Hmm - 35, you say? What are good “when you’re 35” novels?
-
**Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner ** - about the history of two couple-friends - academics; one couple with more money, one with less. Incredibly well-written and insightful about growing up.
-
**Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee **- perfectly written with simple, clear prose, it uses one man’s story of having to come to grips with the fact that he can’t just do anything he wants to comment on growing up as an individual and on South Africa coming to grips with apartheid. Best work of fiction I have read in a while - and definitely for grown-ups in terms of acquired wisdom.
-
**The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies **- the first book in a trilogy set in Canadian academic life. Just a fun, entertaining book that a grown-up would enjoy for the joy of reading about interesting characters, well-captured…
-
**The Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami **- imagine a sort of Existential story about a man feeling displaced in his own reality - written as almost a mid-life crisis adventure. A guy stumbles into a mystery about trying to find a particular sheep in a poster, but it really is a commentary on how adrift we can find ourselves in our own lives…
My $.02