From about age 6 to age 13 I read mostly comics, school having beaten my love for reading out of me.
It came back with a vengence in High School though. My parents simply seemed happy to see me reading and never took issue with anything I read. During this period I mostly read Stephen King and like authors. It wasn’t until later that my tastes expanded to where they are now.
When I was 8 or 9 my mother decided I was old enough to watch R rated movies. (We had cable by this point anyway, so it wasn’t like she could stop me.) I’m sure the same is true about books. If I’d been reading anything other than Archie and Spider-Man at that point, I’m sure that once she figured I was old enough not to understand what I was reading, she’d let me read whatever I wanted with her blessing.
Gotta tell ya, as awful as my childhood was, the one bright spot was that my mom stood up for me against a tyrannical librarian. When I was 11, the movie, The Exorcist had come out and I was naturally eager to read the book the movie was based on, especially since there was no way I would ever be allowed to see it. The librarian at our local branch, who had a problem with me checking books out of the adult section anyway, refused to let me check it out. I told my mother what had happened, and she went down to the library and explained to the librarian that if I was old enough to understand the book, I was old enough to read it.
NEVER. My television and movies were censored heavily, but never my reading. I remember reading Anne Rice’s erotica novels when I was in junior high, and being totally shocked that such things could be purchased at Walden Books.
My parents never really cared what books I read. I did most of my reading out of the library, and I don’t remember being limited to the children’s section. My dad did not approve of superhero comic books, IIRC because they were “unrealistic,” so I wasn’t allowed to waste my money on them. Fortunately one of my cousins did not suffer from this restriction, so whenever we visited I would devour his collection.
Once when I was at the library I tried to check out Dolores Claireborne, by Stephen King, but my father read the back jacket description and decided that I shouldn’t be allowed to read it. This probably happened when I was in seventh grade. After that, I only went to the library by myself. But I’ve still never gotten around to reading Dolores Claireborne.
No censorship here. I generally went to the library on my own and read whatever I liked. However, I don’t recall any of it being too racy anyways. I only checked non-fiction out of the adult section at the library, and read age-appropriate fiction, like the Laura Ingalls Wilder and Margeurite Henry books.
My mother never cared what I read, as long as I was reading. I used to check out a dozen books from the library, read them all and return them the next day to get another batch. When I ran out of books, I’d raid my mother’s romance novels. When I was tall enough to reach them, I’d borrow the classic hardcover novels that she kept on the top shelf. (I was going to say here “Why I was allowed access to the romances before the classics, I don’t know.” but it was probably because the romances were cheap paperbacks, plus the fact that my older sisters were romance fiends and my mother might not have even thought I’d be interested in the classics.)
My father used to (and still does) hassle me about reading “smut books”–which is any book I read that was not for school, not just the aforementioned romances–but he never took any of them away from me.
Aside from making the occasional snide remark on our (lack of) taste, my parents didn’t take any action to direct what we read. With 4 older idiosyncratic sibs I had access to a huge range of books and by third or fourth grade I was alternating between “Biggles” one day and Borges’ “Labyrinths” the next (admittedly Biggles was mostly lost on me at that age)
My school on the other hand did supervise what I read. They exempted me from participating in English class and I could just sit there and read so long as the material was approved by them first. When I brought “A Clockwork Orange” they strongly counselled me to leave that until I was older. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d already read the American version. Oh, and they also confiscated my sister’s copy of “The Kama Sutra of Vatsayayana”. Jesuits! (I hope it got one of them off, hehehe)
The only time that my parents ever told me not to read something was when I was seven. I had gotten this one big red medical book off of the shelf at my house–I think it was the AMA Family Medical Guide–and started reading it. As a result, I began to start conversations at the dinner table about things I read in the book.
Believe me, starting a conversation about severe impetigo while your parents are trying to eat without projectile vomiting is Not A Good Idea.
After that, they took the book away from me, because they thought I was getting way to fascinated with the word of medicine. In addition to these fun and productive dinner conversations, I had also started diagnosing the elderly members of my family with various illnesses, thereby freaking myself and said elderly relatives out.
My mother is an avid reader, and I grew up in a house full of books. A lot of her academic books, too (she’s a teacher, Latin and Greek), which were sometimes very interesting (I know al about Roman and Greek Mythology, now ).
She never censored my books, even gave me quite explicit books on sexuality, menstrual cycles, all that stuff.
Nope. And I’m positive they would not have even had I had desire to read more adult material. Lewd and overly explicit things generally don’t appeal to me at all.
Once she reads Mists she’ll wonder what she ever say in Mr. Potter! Seriously though, I don’t think at 12 that I would have “gotten” the main plot point of Mists, but it would have turned me onto Wicca much sooner.
The only books my parents censored were the adult Harlequin and Silhouette romances. I could read any “adult” literature I wanted, but not the trashy romance novels. That didn’t stop me from reading every “First Love by Silhouette” novel that I could get my hands on. Not to mention a host of Judy Blume and Stephen King novels that I’m sure were much more graphic than any trashy romance.
My parents never did but I had a teacher once who talked me out of buying “The Naked Ape” at a school book fair.
I thought it was because it had the word naked in the title, but it turned out he objected to it because it promoted Darwinism.
My parents never censored anything I read, and my brother (nine years older) placed himself in charge of my literary education. I guess he felt he had failed with my sister, who really liked the “sweeping family epic romances” category. So he would hand me books to read. If you think a steady diet of Nero Wolfe and Doc Savage doesn’t warp a girl, think again.
After years of reading everything he handed me, my mom finally objected to one of the books he gave me to read on a long car vacation…Catch-22. She didn’t know what it was about, but she decided I should wait a few years for that one (I think I was 14 at the time). So I read the other book he had given me…Desmond Morris’ “The Naked Ape”. Yep, Mom was pretty clueless.
I still haven’t read Catch-22. I’m now 46. Think she’ll let me now?
I think there’s a difference between censorship and guidance. My mother never told me outright that I couldn’t read a particular book but there were times when she said I should wait 'til I was older. In most cases I think she made good calls.
