It’s barely mentioned in the books so it’s easy to miss, and I don’t think there are any references to futuristic consumer technology. But the Murrays seem to be big on simple living, so they probably wouldn’t all have the latest gadgets. IIRC the future setting is really only significant in that the reader doesn’t need to accept Dr. Mrs. Murray’s discoveries related to cell mitochondria in the second book or Dr. Mr. Murray’s astrophysics work in the first book as being currently plausible.
You know all those sex manuals? “The Sensuous Woman,” “The Joy of Sex,” “The Sensuous Man,” “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask,” “The Happy Hooker/Xaviera Hollander” books etc. A lot of groovy adults had these books, and I secretly read them all, starting at age 11.
I was a teenage sexpert.
I started reading Stephen King in the fifth grade (I’d attempted The Tommyknockers the summer before, but I gave up, for what ever reason). The horror genre intrigued me especially when I was younger, but I wasn’t exclusive, although I stuck with King for a couple years.
Anyways, It, the first King book I finished, was like a masterpiece to me. I need to reread it, but I still like it for a lot of reasons. And I don’t know if it was too much for me (I have vague memories of being disturbed by a passage in which a man’s penis was nailed to the wall), but I don’t see any mental scars here. If anything, King’s work helped me broaden my mind.
I read both Animal Farm before 4th grade, and I read 1984 during 4th or 5th. They’re among my favorite books (Animal Farm was the first book I really liked), although I didn’t grasp all of the satire in Animal Farm (which I recently read for the third time), and I could probably get more out of a reread of 1984.
I read 100 Years of Solitude in the original Spanish when I was 12. I learned a lot from that book. I still feel sorry for the teenage prostitute who must entertain 100 men each night to pay for the house she accidentally burned down. Ouch.
I was in high school when I read Flowers in the Attic, mostly 'cause the girls in my school were also reading it. The incest creeped me out, and I cried when the little boy died of arsenic poisoning. I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest of the series. I have some choice words for V.C. Andrews, but this isn’t the Pit so I won’t add them to this post.
I read “The World According to Garp” when I was in the 5th grade and learned many interesting things from that book.
Zap comics.
Yeah, those. ::nods::
The most disturbing impact was reading Slaughterhouse 5 when I was…umm I dunno. Damn young and innocent. Maybe 11.
I don’t think I was too young to read it, but my mother did. A Patch of Blue, by Elizabeth Kata. It was the only book she ever hid from me. Fortunately I knew where she probably put it (I was right) so I went and got it. Kept putting it back so she wouldn’t know. I don’t remember how old I was, but at least junior high age. There were parts of it I didn’t really get, but that was as much lack of knowledge, small-town wise, as lack of years. And I was a singularly naive, uninformed child. The book touched me, though, and now I’m thinking I should read it again.
Snuck into my sisters room (older obviously) and Read her Anais Nin novels… loved that stuff…
At school we passed around Judy Blume’s novel “Wifey”…hot stuff for fifth grade…
My brother being the total perve (again older) had massive amounts of swedish erotica magazines… after learning from Seka… Veronica Hart…and Annette Haven… by the time i had my "talk"with dad… i had to kinda act surprised… lol
I was much too young to have read R. Crumb at 6, but I still remember very clearly Mr. Natural and him talking about boiled cabbage and falling into a pit and meeting the devil? sorry, its been 28 years since Ive seen it. The over sized woman was slightly confusing but didnt mean much to me at 6. By the time I was a teen it was interesting, but I had a firm grasp of the subject and found the over sized women to be a turn off.
When I was 11-12 I read some kids horror series and grossed a bunch of kids in my school out trying to describe it, all I remember now is the baseball playing robot that used real eyeballs in one of the books. The funny thing is I have always been very scared of horror, and even too this day prefer to not watch it at all. Though come to think of it, when I got into those books I had just started recovering from an amputation of a leg.
When I was in middle school I read some soft core erotic chick lit I bought from the bookstore - I honestly thought it was an adventure book about a girl out to revenge her family. When I got to the part about the nuns being stripped naked and raped and then made to drink their own blood, I figured I shouldn’t tell my mom about this particular book.
It was a horrifying yet fascinating read.
I read “The World According to Garp” when I had just turned 12. For some reason I thought it was about an alien and his funny adventures on Earth, like “Mork and Mindy,” my fave show at the time. I ended up loving it and checking some other John Irving books out of the library, but I was totally clueless about the sex scenes.
The scene with Garp and Cushie at the cannons, I had a vague idea what rubbers were, but not the details of how they were used. And then it says something about how they both noticed that Garp was erect, and Cushie said, oh, that’s too bad. I thought, “how would he be standing upright and they JUST SUDDENLY notice? And why would that be bad?”
Also, my parents had “Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask” and I stole it and read it at around the same age. It clarified the Garp stuff as well as teaching me all about fetishes, priapism, homosexuality, prostitution, and all kinds of other advanced knowledge. I amazed my friends by knowing everything they ever wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask), but didn’t have any actual experience myself until I was 17.
I read The Hobbit when I was 11. I started reading Stephen King novels around that time too. I read a lot of Michael Crichton books then too. I read Catch-22 when I was in 7th or 8th grade, because it was supposed to be one of the 20th century’s Great Masterpieces. It was a terrible book. Same with Catcher in the Rye. Boring and full of sniveling and whining. When I had to read those books again in 11th grade I just skimmed em just enough to recall the material.
I would say my reading has slowed down a bit, but it’s more turned towards reading online forums than books these days.
Besides my dad’s Playboys that I snuck peeks at when I was a teen? 
Tons, actually. I specifically recall reading Catcher in the Rye as part of a school assignment. An actual school assignment! Forget what grade, but I think it was junior high sometime (and I wouldn’t consider my school all that liberal.)
I also read both 1984 and Animal Farm as part of school assignments, both in grade 11. I actually, ironically, trace the reading of those books to my becoming interested in socialism.
At some point I was reading lots of spy novels and came across “Eye of the Needle”, which was a fine spy novel, but had a pretty graphic oral description I read before I was really aware of the concept of oral.
My grandfather’s paperback pornos, found under his bed. I was probably ten.
A few years later, my stepsister and I found out that the really big dictionary in our house had a special slang section in the back, with all the dirty words we’d ever heard and a whole bunch more. We actually copied out a list of stuff we hadn’t known and hid it under the mattress of her bed for later study. Embarrassing when Mom pulled that out…
Those exact books at that exact age. Frankenstein in 4th grade. The Amityville Horror when I was 9. Fanny Hill in 9th grade.
Stephen King, starting at age 10 or 11. I think *Carrie *was the first book of his that I read, but I moved through Cujo, Firestarter, and *It *pretty quickly after that. I loves me some King.
The Clan of the Cave Bear books. My mom did think they’d be too much for me at one point, but apparently let me read them anyway - it’s not like I hid it.
Animal Farm. I can’t remember when I read it, but I totally didn’t get it.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Not that it was too big for me, but I remember it being such a *slog *when I was 12. It was seriously hard to get through; I felt like I didn’t make any progress! Read it again as an adult, no problem. As an adult, it’s a pretty fast read, actually.
The autobiography of that woman who said a dingo killed her baby. I only read the prison bits.
I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull when I was 8 or so. At that time (around 1973), it was an immensely popular book.
It wasn’t like there were sex scenes or anything like that, but I’m sure that a lot of it went over my head. I was just reading about a seagull who really liked to fly. 