When I was in 4th grade my favourite book was P.S. Your Cat is Dead. ot it from my grandmother. No, she didn’t give it to me. And not really her sort of book, but she was a librarian and brought home all kinds of stuff the library was replacing or whatever.
If you don’t know it’s the story of a confused/bi '70 era NY actor (not unlike it’s author, the guy who wrote Chorus Line) who subdues and ties up a gay burgalar and…let’s say I learned a lot.
And read my step father’s Playboys and my aunt’s Penthouse’s. (my aunt had better taste). And my mom’s Fear of Flying and Fanny. But if you think my childhood knowledge was all zippless fuck, also my mom’s college textbook Human Sexuality.
And in junior high my classmates thought I was a geek (not that I wasn’t) but didn’t realize the big thick library books I was reading in the lunchroom were Henry Miller.
That and 1984, Cat’s Cradlel, The Inquisitor, Anna Karinina,Our Lady of the Floweres, Naked Lunch…what did I read that was age approprate?
I’m seconding the Lord of the Flies vote. I have no idea how old I was when I read it, just that I felt sickened and miserable for several days afterwards. It didn’t help that I saw that movie from the '60s at about the same time, too.
And I tried to read A Tale Of Two Cities for the first time when I was a kid, and it was completely over my head. I thought I’d like it, because I liked A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist. I gave up after a couple of chapters, and then read the whole thing for the first time ever in my '40s, and thought it was one of the best books I ever read.
I got hold of some Anaïs Nin at about age twelve. After Gravity’s Rainbow at eight, it pretty much confirmed for me that smart, sophisticated adults liked their sex kind of mechanical and dehumanizing. I was already getting smoochy-woochy-romantic thoughts about girls; I started thinking I might be some straight kind of gay or something, because I was not about to match that action.
A Clockwork Orange at about age 12. I’d read a lot of more adult material by then, but this one only because we had the soundtrack album. This was the first I’d heard Beethoven’s music and I associated it with the movie, so I just had to read the book. Also, the album cover was well, intriguing.
I read a lot of stuff at way too young an age. My dad belonged to the Playboy Book Club (which wasn’t as bad as it sounded, but a lot of the books weren’t exactly kid fodder). I don’t remember my parents ever censoring what I read. Some of the highlights include:
The Rape of the A.P.E. by Alan Sherman (funny, but rather R-rated) Killer, by Joey (the autobiography of a Mafia hit man) The Ungodly (historical novel about the Donner Party) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) Helter Skelter
Several Harold Robbins books (which I got from my 7th grade math teacher, who in retrospect was probably a perv). I read the one in the OP at about the same age. The Godfather
83 Hours Till Dawn (the true-life account of an heiress who was kidnapped and stashed in a coffin-sized underground box until her father paid the ransom.
Only the latter affected me in any way (that one gave me nightmares) but the stuff about sex, serial killers and cannibalism…I enjoyed those a lot. I think my love for horror novels was born at a very young age.
I don’t recall my exact age, but I was pretty young; 10 or less think. My mother let me have untrammeled access to her book collection. After reading my first sci-fi book right through in a day and liking it, I decided I wanted more. I picked up the next one on the shelf since I didn’t know where to start. It turned out to be Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light And Darkness. That book took me the rest of the summer to puzzle though, and by then I’d forgotten the beginning. It wasn’t traumatizing, but it was pretty baffling.
I checked that book out of the library when I was in 6th grade. The movie had been playing on HBO, and while I didn’t see it at the time, the trailers made me curious.
Considering I had only just learned about the birds and the bees (my parents had surreptitiously placed a copy of Where Did I Come From? on my bookshelf), it was quite an education.
When I was 8 or so, I found a collection of H.P. Lovecraft short stories on my mother’s bookshelf. I asked her “is this any good?” and she told me I couldn’t read that book. “The hell I can’t”, I thought. I waited until she was out of the house, took it into my room and read The Dunwich Horror. For some reason I assumed that it was a historical account of actual events, which I assumed came to a conclusion in the 1920’s. We were inactive Catholics at the time and this story shook my faith in the Holy Trinity. I read At the Mountains of Madness that same night.
I “borrowed” her copy of Jaws about 2 years later. My father gave me The Hobbit later that same year, when I was 10. I started *The Lord of the Rings *when I was in the sixth grade, so age 11. I made it through Fellowship and Two Towers but bogged down early in Return of the King. I read Alive, the story of the college football team stranded in the Andes and forced to cannibalism when I was 12. I checked it out from the school library so I figured it was age appropriate.
I didn’t start reading sex stuff until I was 14, with The Exorcist and found the crucifix-masturbation scene quite shocking. I read The Godfather later that same year.
A lot. The one that comes to mind right now is The Martian Chronicles. My mom ordered it from the library for some reason, and I found it lying around.
I started reading Stephen King when I was pretty young. Probably a fourth of fifth grader. But it was Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher that freaked me right out as a fifth grader.
I read ‘Let’s Go Play at the Adams’’ when I was about 10. Kids capture their babysitter then rape and kill her. Very, very dark. Google it, there are people still freaked out about it.it,
I don’t know what it was called–it was some sort of pulp paperback that a friend had gotten from her older sister–but it was about two teenage girls hitchhiking around the country and having random and detailed sex. The book probably wasn’t all that salacious, but I was a 12-year-old Baptist at the time and to me it seemed so naughty.
I attempted both *Lolita *and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was 12, almost 13. Made it through the former but didn’t really “get it” until I re-read it a few years later. Got halfway through the latter before deciding that those guys sounded way too weird and scary for me and that it would turn into some kind of horror novel where someone’s head graphically imploded from too much drug consumption.
I’ve remembered another one- and it wasn’t about smut or violence. Just the opposite.
For my tenth birthday, my sister’s caretaker gave me The Thinking Jewish Teenager’s Guide To Life. I guess she figured, I was into religion, I was nearly a teen, it would be a good read.
Looking back, I can see the book was meant for older teens, and young adults. It’s a very deep, very difficult volume that was supposed to be read by mature teenagers wondering what to so with their futures. Needless to say, I was very confused.
The chapter that gave me the most problems was the one titled, “Men and Women”. The author seemed to be talking about something that went on between guys and gals- something that he said our whole culture was obsessed with- but I couldn’t figure out what.
When I was 12 or 13, I read Men in Love by Nancy Friday. My mom picked it up as it was left behind at the hotel where she worked. My guess is they left it intentionally because it had a substantial amount of dried blood on it, but oddly, no pages were stuck together. I would sneak it out, read a fantasy, then sneak it back.
Tanith Lee writes fantasy for children. She also writes fantasy for adults. So when I had read all the children’s books at age ten or so I decided to to check out the adult ones which turned to revolve around an incredibly horny demonic being called IIRC Azrahrn and his copulations with man, woman, demon and practically anything else that moved. :eek:
