I READ THAT! And probably about the same age! Daniel P. Mannix was the author (I know as I have a bio on Crowley by him.)
I couldn’t figure out what was going on when he wrote about the Emperor’s slave boy and how they would grope under each others robes & their faces would flush. What was THAT all about?
To answer the OP- I was a devotee of true crime & “real vampires/monsters of history” books so I was regailing my fellow 5th graders with tales of Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathorny (that’s how I always pronounced it- a friend finally told me a decade ago that I was saying it wrong), and worst of all Gilles de Rais!
When I was in 3rd grade, my sweet little grandma bought me a bunch of Beverly Cleary-type books. Ramona, Henry Huggins, and such. One of them was “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.” Mom took it away from me because of the frequent discussions of menstraution and boobs.
Huh, most of the sexual material I read when I was young came from reference books (you can learn a lot about the anatomy of the opposite sex just from the dictionary, not to mention the Encyclopedia Brittanica). Though if Mom had found me reading an “adult” book, she would probably have wanted to talk to me about it, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t take it away.
Ellen Cherry, I read parts of My First 500 when I was about 16 or so. I can’t believe someone else remembers it!
I read Myra Breckinridge when I was 12ish. Lots of weirdness, especially about transsexuality. Of course, I didn’t understand a lot of it. My grandparents gave it to me and my sisters. They were German, and saved any books in English that they ran across for their American granddaughters. You would have thought the cover would have been a tip-off, though.
I did understand Last Tango in Paris, which I devoured at age 14. Ah, hormones.
My dad gave me Stephen King’s It to read when I was… wayyyy too young. I can’t remember what age I was, but I do remember having to go to my dad to get a definition of a word: penis. So I was young enough to not know what a penis was.
But it started me on a lifelong love of Stephen King (and penises).
Read all of those trashy The Book of Lists/The People’s Almanac as soon as they were released - from 8 - 12 or so. I probably knew more about American sexual preferences than my grandmother did.
Had a big old book about disasters in the third grade. Had a teacher worry about that one when I brought it to school.
After Silence of the Lambs beat Beauty & The Beast for Best Picture in 1991, I wanted to see it. My dad handed me the book (which he read before the movie was even made) and said if I can make it through the book, I could see the film. I read it and loved it, even though my teachers were very nervous about the idea of me reading it. Oh, I was 11 at the time.
Heh, I loved RL Stine books as a Kid and would voraciously read them all and then quickly moved onto Fear street books, but that wasn’t enough.
So in the 4th Grade I read the book “Cujo” and I remember that book distinctly as it was the first time I had seem the word “cum” and I thought it was “come” misspelled, and I kept looking up the word Come in the dictionary trying to figure out why the Husband was so angry that the police officer was trying to tell him “there’s another man’s come” on his bed.
And then I figured it out. And since then I was reading King, and plenty of others.
Clan of the Cave Bears was another one when I realized “hmmm… I probably shouldn’t be reading this” when I was a lil’ kid. But to be fair the Rape sequences in that book were related to the plot. It was only when I read the Valley of Horses and then the Mammoth Hunters a few years later when I was about 13 or 14 that I realized “hmm… perhaps this series isn’t quite trying to be JUST historical fiction like the* Killer Angels*.”
But I still to this day love Valley of the Horses. GREAT book.
I read Scruples by Jackie Collins (along with other similar novels by Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, et al.) when I was 12. I am pretty sure my parents didn’t know what they were about when they were purchased. I also read V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic series starting at about 11. About that same time I also read Rosemary’s Baby (and ended up asking my Mom what “oral sex” means because of it) and some Stephen King.
And the number one “too young to be reading” book, I read Ordeal by Linda Lovelace before I was even in high school. I pulled the paper jacket off the cover so that no one would know that I was reading “smut”.
ETA: Along different lines as above, my oldest son read Jurassic Park (the actual novel, not the for-kids version) when he was in the 4th grade. He did a book report on it and impressed the heck out of his teacher.
I read all kinds of things that probably would have been considered too “old” for me as a kid, but I can’t think of anything that upset me. I wasn’t interested in horror, so I wasn’t reading much scary stuff. I remember my mother being concerned about my reading books with sex scenes, but the sex scenes in a typical novel aren’t really that explicit, and seem even less explicit when the reader knows very little about sex!
I reread that series for fun when I was in grad school, and realized something that I’d totally missed when I read them as a kid – they’re set in the future. At least, they were set in the future at the time they were written and it was still the future when I was a kid, although I think time has caught up by now. This isn’t really significant to the story, I think it just as easily could have been set in the then-present, but at one point in the second or third book a family friend of the Murrays refers to the moon landing. She says that Dr. Mrs. Murray was probably too young to remember it, and Dr. Mrs. Murray says that she’s not that young. This is a woman with teenaged kids, so I think the books must have been set in at least the late '90s. If they’d been set in the '60s-70s when they were written, even the children would have been old enough to remember the moon landing.
Haven’t read it in a while, but the part that stuck with me was where (I believe) Sonny talks about “how hard it is to get a virgin to blow [you], and when they do they turn out to be lousy,” and comparing the skin color of girls’ asses (I specifically remember the “olive” color being mentioned). No wonder he’d had to be treated for “clap” twice.
Wow, I never actually realized that till just now. Though I haven’t reread Wind in the Door or Swiftly Tilting Planet in a really long time. Thanks for posting it–that’s a cool factoid.
My mom used to read Mark Twain to me before I could read, as my bedtime story, when I was about 5. They were awesome, but I was infected with Twainian wit.
However, what I was too young to read was when I was in the 5th or 6th grade – went to the public library and could check out anything I wanted. Mostly it was paperbacks with fantasy or sci-fi covers.
Once, that included a random Gor book (bored). Another time, a fictionalized account of the reign of the Emperor Elagabalus. :eek:
I knew enough not to ask my parents what some of the stuff in that one meant, but I had to go use the BIG dictionary a lot while reading through. (couldn’t find “penocracy”, though. and then Neil Gaiman goes and uses the same word in his Heliogabalus 24-hour comic! sheesh)
