I grew up with no TV or radio (fundamentalist religion) - so reading was my world. And, oh yes, it was censored! I recall that we received the hardback Reader’s Digest condensed books (horrible! chopping up novels) - and my mother wouldn’t let me read the first couple of pages where the couple was making out on the beach before she was shark-bait. (I sneaked a peek and read it anyway).
I devoured Laura Ingalls books, and all the Trixie Belden(sp?), James Herriot, Little Women, etc. I now enjoy reading the classics (Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry) with my kiddos.
I LOVED Mad magazine - I think my parents didn’t quite understand how violent Spy vs Spy was, so that one made it past the censor screen.
Since my kiddos are just 6 and 8, at this point I more concerned with getting them to read than what they’re reading!
Gosh Trixie Belden! I haven’t thought of her in ages. I just acquired copies of two of the mysteries that I read to death from the library. They are both by Elizabeth Honness written in the mid-50s. For kids books they have aged pretty well. And happily I still love them.
I think if my 6th grade teacher had paid attention to me instead of just dismissing me as "peculiar’ she have had quite the education from my reading material. As I mentioned earlier I was reading Sybil at that time, with all its wierd sexual abuse, pedophilia and lesbianism.
I also remember reading everything the library had of Jack Douglas. He was one of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson’s writers. His books were funny and all about sex… and wolves… and rice…
My favorite was The Jewish Japanese Sex and Cook Book and How to Raise Wolves (swear to god thats its actual title!) I would dearly LOVE to get my hands on a copy of it!
I hit the books at age four (self-taught) and never looked back. I often picked up stuff that was “too old” for me, and sometimes I learned a bit, and sometimes I just got confused. If I got confused, I just put that book aside and came back to it later.
I don’t think it ever did me a bit of harm, and when I was in junior high, my mom did me the HUGE favor of telling the school librarian that I had permission to read everything in the “secret room” in the back, where they put all the books that had been pulled from the shelves due to pressure from censors.
During the summer, my freshly 12 year-old stepson often comes with me to work, which involves a lot of driving, and we listen to books on tape. He loved “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Martian Chronicles” and I can’t remember the last time we picked out a book from the children/teens section in the library.
He wants desperately to start with Stephen King books, but we’re holding off on those until he’s 13 – he gets so emotionally invested with his reading, and we’re just starting to trust him alone for a few hours if we go out at night. It’s hard to be home alone at night when Cujo is prowling outside and the clown from IT is under your bed.
BTW, Krisfer – I have read “The Jewish Japanese Sex and Cookbook and How To Raise Wolves” from my local LIbrary, and it’s hilarious!
Eh, only for age appropriateness. When I was about, oh, 7 or 8, for example, I saw Flowers in the Attic on my mom’s bookshelf and wanted to read it. She said I had to wait until I was older. I pretty much forgot all about it until I was twelve and my friends were reading it at school, so I asked my mom and she gave me the book.
And when my sister was maybe, 11 or 12, she wanted to read Stephen King’s IT. My mom asked me about it, since I owned the book, and I said I thought it was a little mature for her age, and gave my mom the book to skim through. My sister wasn’t allowed to read it until she was say, fourteen?
That’s really all. My mom would warn me that reading some scary books would give me nightmares (and they did! LOL), but other than that, nothing. Oh, well, she did scoff at me reading her bodice rippers and giggling over the sex parts. Just as long as I didn’t take them to school, she was fine with it.
Can I just say that I adore the amount of voracious readers on this board?
My parents, similar types, raising a dorky and precocious child, let me read whatever my heart desired. Our house was crammed with books (when my family moved 5 years ago, the amount of book boxes was greater than all the other boxes put together. They don’t ever throw books away. My dad still has his mid-sixties engineering textbooks. Needless to say the new house had a dedicated library). They only thing off limits were my mom’s antiques.
God bless them, they didn’t even blink when I began exploring some of my wierd historical focuses in depth. (Endemic diseases is one of my favorite topics). When I went to college, I got a credit card I was to use only for necsesities, defined by them as food, toiletries, and books. If I charged one $15 shirt at the gap, I got a phone call, but $100 at B&N? Not a word. Of course, I rarely did that. For five years I had one of the largest lending libraries on the east coast at my disposal-- and always free, and such a strange and interesting variety to it, as well. The only thing about college I still miss.
You too! Nobody I know seems to have ever heard of him. My favorite was “Shutup and eat your snow shoes” though “The neighbors are scaring my wolves” was great also.
We didn’t have a Library in our small town (26 people) so I had to beg borrow and steal books until I was in school. But anything I could get my hands on was fine with my parents. When I was nine I used to work small jobs at the local store .The owner would pay me with all the magazines he tore the cover off and was supposed to throw away. So I started reading Playgirl, Playboy and Sex to sexty when I was nine.
Hi Tinkertoy ( boy do I have memories of you as a child:D )
Maybe I should start a thread about Jack Douglas… see how many dopers have read him. I have a battered paperback ofShut Up and Eat your Snowshoes and thanks toGMRyujin there is now one less copy of TJJSCB AND HTRW at Amazon:D
I got my own library card as soon as I could print my full name (about 6?) and was never restricted regarding what I could read. My mom didn’t like Mad magazine, probably because she felt it was trashy, but my dad kept all his copies in the basement, so I used to hang out down there and read them.
Since I was into ghosts and mystery stories, I did explore the mysteries in the adult section of the library and have a vague memory of reading a book that involved necrophilia, Druids and someone’s headless teacher. Bizarrely, I was more disturbed by the attempted rape scene in Julie of the Wolves (a classic kids’ book) then by the necrophilia thing.
The only book that mysteriously “disappeared” from my possession was my dad’s copy of The Happy Hooker, which I was fascinated by when I was about eleven or twelve.
Heh, Mr. Armadillo and I just moved. When we packed the U-Haul, easily half or more of the boxes were books, mostly mine. We still have an entire bedroom with boxes all over the floor that have been opened and pawed through (gotta find that one book, where is it?!), but not yet unpacked, as I’ve run out of bookcases to contain them.
I was never censored as a child either. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird at a very young age, maybe 7 or 8. I used to read everything I could get my hands on. (I was caught many a time reading in bed after lights out, by the light of the hallway.)
I read The Exorcist in 7th grade, I think, and I did a book report on The Summer of '42 in the 8th grade. I was very disappointed that I only got a C on it. I was a straight A student, and my teacher was NOT happy that I did a report on this particular book. To be fair to Ms. Beatty, I didn’t really understand the book at the time.
I was never so grateful that my son finally started reading around 6th grade. He got hooked on Stephen King when he read Misery, followed by The Stand. He still reads - mostly biographies of pro wrestlers. But he is excited about Wolves of the Calla!
I think it must be a prerequisite for the SDMB to be an avid reader!
Did my parents restrict my reading habits? They tried to! Like Delores Reborn, I was often caught reading after lights out, but I did it by my nightlight. I was chastized for reading romance novels, but once they realized that I’d already read one, and got the gist of what was going on, they quit making me stop.
I wasn’t allowed to read “Kiss the Girls” in 7th grade, so I borrowed it. My dad got ticked at that one.
In high school, my mom tried to tell me not to read so many books about people with psychological problems, trying to convince me that was one of the causes of my depression. Yeah, Mom, ok. Thanks anyway.
Mostly, they didn’t know what I checked out, and when the library got a self-checkout machine… yeah!!!