Grown-up Book Questions

[mrissa]

Over in Novel Gazing, I asked a question (or series of questions) I'd like to repeat here: when did you start reading "adult" books? I don't mean erotica or porn, I mean the books that are shelved in the grown-up section of the library or bookstore. (Which of those is more mature than which children's/YA novels is another discussion entirely.) Do you remember what you started with? Was it gradual or all at once? Did anyone try to stop you from reading things they thought were "too old" for you? Did they succeed? Do you think they were right?

If you have kids, do you set a firm marketing-division limit on them (as in, no grown-up books until you're X years old), or do you take it on a case-by-case basis, or do you let them roam the library/bookstore and talk with them about what they choose, or what? If you don't have kids, how do you handle it with gifts to nieces/nephews/young friends, or how do you hope to handle it with future spawn?

My dad gave me Prelude to Foundation when I was 11-nearly-12, because he was so darned excited it was out in the first place. And I had been reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong series, and the last one was shelved in the adult SF/fantasy section at the bookstore there in Kansas. So the store owner showed me where it was. I was absolutely boggled: there was an entire section of the kind of books I liked best. Including more Asimov and more McCaffrey: who knew they had written more? Who knew it all had a name? I was in a daze for a week. Hmm. I may still be in that daze, actually, fourteen years later. I may have arranged my life around that daze. I think it was late June/early July: school was out, but my birthday hadn't come up yet. So it's around my grown-up-book-iversary.

(When I run out of things to celebrate, I mentally dub it the nanoversary of something: X times 10^-9 seconds have passed since whatever it was, marriage or whatever. Then, yay! Time to celebrate. Happy nanoversary!)

I had read a few adult books before that, including some with "adult content" -- Mary Stewart's Merlin series was a recommendation from my mom when I was 9 or 10. But that was the dividing line for me, and it was a fairly sharp one.

One of my friends recently talked about how her older brother took a King novel from her when she was 12 because it was "too old" for her and how grateful she was and how right he was. And I was just stunned, because I'd have been furious if anyone had tried to do that to me. Scott once told me I "didn't need to" read a certain book, in a kind of closed-off tone that I took as "it'll be too scary for you," so I promptly went out and read it. Turns out it was a tonal misunderstanding: the issue was that the book in question, Piers Anthony's Firefly I think it was, sucked. Oops. But still, I got an allergy to being told books were too old for me when I was 5 and my kindergarten teacher tried to keep me from reading The Prince and the Pauper, and I have not yet recovered from it.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

The first two grown-up books I remember reading were Watership Down and The Source of Magic, and I was.... second or third grade for both of them. (I don't remember my childhood clearly, but I remember what house we were living in, so I must have been around eight. I clearly remember not understanding more than one word in five of Watership Down, but I was enchanted by it.

And I clearly remember trying to read and being frustrated by grown-up books before then.

By the time I was 11 or 12, I'd read all sorts of desperately inappropriate things. Anything I could get my hands on, really. Including Stephen King's The Stand, which I read about a hundred pags of and gave up on as stultifyingly boring, and some of those hideous John Norman novels.

I don't think any of it harmed me any.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Watership Down is a grown-up book?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It was written for adult audiences. It's a political allegory, a parable about fascism, Stalinism, industrialization, capitalism, and so forth. Pretty brutal on a lot of levels, actually.

What gave you the idea it was a kid's book?

(I also read Adam's The Plague Dogs around the same time, which is an incredibly dark book, with one hell of a Gordon Lightfoot ending.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was a very political child, so being a political allegory about all those things you listed was not enough to classify it as adult in my head. My favorite game when I was 8 was "political refugees fleeing an oppressive government," because my friends would play it with me (they got to skulk and run around, and there were Bad Guys Chasing Us) and because I got to give stirring speeches about...well, your above list, plus a few. I read Watership Down for the first time when I was 16 and haaaaaated it. You know how some SF/fantasy people are on about how they hate LotR and everybody else loves it? I feel that way about Watership Down.

I still find animal-form political stuff rather juvenile, and that includes Animal Farm. Especially Animal Farm actually: I read that one when I was 14, after I'd already read The Gulag Archipelago, and it just seemed insipid. Ooh, ooh, we'll seeeeeeecretly disguise all the major Russian Revolution figures as pigs, only everybody will know it's them! Clever clever.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I actually think Watership Down is a far superior book to Animal Farm, because it works on levels above and beyond political allegory.

In any case, it's definitely not written at a young adult audience.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I believe my paper about Watership Down for my senior year English class was called something like "It's Not Just About Stalin," so I'll agree with that in contrast to Animal Farm.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The penny just dropped on what The Source of Magic is, and I feel the need to assert that Xanth books are not grown-up books. Not not not! I agree with you that they are shelved there, and that thus you were reading grown-up books at that age by the definition I gave. But Xanth is totally YA to my way of thinking.

(Do you ever find yourself being a little careful with the phrase "in my book," lest people think you have made such assertions in your actual book(s)?)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's not that Xanth is YA so much as that it's juvenile and shallow. *g*

And no, I never thought of "in my book" that way.... until just now.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I read all sorts of books when I was growing up. I can't remember when the first adult book I read was, but I do remember reading Stephen King and Jean Auel as a young teenager (12-14 years old) and being allowed, but when I was 12 my mother caught me reading her copy of Kathleen Woodiwiss's Shanna and while she let me finish it, she told me that I wasn't to read any more of her romance novels as I wasn't old enough. I proceeded to sneak-read all her romance novels throughout my teenage years. To this day, romance novels are still a guilty pleasure.

I started reading SF/F around the time I was 15--I was bored on a family camping trip, ran out of reading material and picked up a book of my dad's. Something about some sort of Sand Wars. I was hooked and since my dad, uncle, and cousin are all SF/F fans, there were always plenty of books to read. The first series that I ever really loved was Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series. Oh, Jon-Tom!

But in terms of non-genre books, I was reading adult non-fiction well before fiction, and I know I read other, non-children's/non-YA stuff before, but I can't recall precisely which ones they were, as the genre stuff made a deeper and more lasting impression on me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, nonfiction, yah, I forgot about that. I was reading history books about the Great Depression from the University library when I was 9 and 10 years old. (Heh. I complained to the gifted-ed. teacher that they didn't have the books I needed in the library at my grade school, and she promised to take me to whatever level of library I needed to find them. Ended up having to take me out of class to drive to UNO to find the things that were in bibliographies from the public library. She was...surprised.) But since I didn't read nonfiction for pleasure yet then, it didn't register.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

One of the first non-fiction books I ever read was Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine--which came out in 1981. My dad had a hardback of it, so it must have been right around then that I read it. I was 7 in 1981.

I read basically every book in our house. We didn't have a lot of money for book buying when I was a little kid, and the 15 book limit at the library wasn't sufficient during the summers--I'd max out my limit every week and be done with the books by Friday or Saturday. Bookmobile night was Tuesdays, you see. I devoured girls' genre fiction--Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, the Dana Girls, but especially Cherry Ames. Oh, how I love Cherry Ames.

But when I ran out of fiction, there were reference books to be read and I read them. A lot of Readers' Digest books and books about animals. When I was 14, I read a whole bunch of the Icelandic sagas. And the Poetic and Prose Eddas. Ah, Vikings.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My father started reading Sherlock Holmes to me when I was five or six (and started with "The Speckled Band," to boot), so my grasp of the whole YA/Adult thing was shaky from the start. I honestly cannot remember when I started reading adult books on my own. I do know I was reading about sex well before I had any personal interest in it. If it warped me, I'm happy about it.

The Very Big Deal for me was getting my first adult library card. Which I still have. I was eleven. Clearly by that point my parents had given up on trying to control, or even monitor, what I read, but I don't remember them ever trying to interfere with my reading. I do remember them being startled a couple of times to discover I'd read something they hadn't quite intended me to, but that's different. They never said I shouldn't have read those books; they just hadn't imagined I would.

I do remember defiantly reading White Fang in third grade, because my Language Arts teacher made the mistake of saying it was probably too hard for me (language-wise, not content-wise, although I do not know why Jack London keeps getting classified as suitable for children and young adults just because he writes about animals). It was, but I read it anyway on pure unadulterated stubbornness.

[pameladean]

I pretty much read whatever I wanted. My parents tended to keep the James Bond books, Mary McCarthy, and The Catcher in the Rye up above my eye level, and I had some subliminal understanding that I wasn't supposed to read them, but I just did it when they went out and I was babysitting my younger brothers. I know I was reading James Thurber at the age of eight. I also know that at some point I exhausted the children's section of the local library and my mother bullied the powers-that-be into giving me an adult library card so that I could browse freely. This must have been before ninth grade, because that was the cutoff: if you were in the ninth grade you could have access to the entire library.

Oddly enough, although my mom thought the Ian Fleming books were not suitable for me, she left John D. MacDonald lying around, and really there's quite a lot of sex in those. I should ask her -- I suspect that she found MacDonald's brand of sexism less horrific than Fleming's, possibly not even quite recognizing it as sexism at all, and it was that rather than the simple sex that she preferred me not to be reading. She ranted so much about Mickey Spillane that I decided I wouldn't like it (later on, I sure as hell didn't -- ugh).

I didn't really like a lot of what I took off my parents' shelves; it's the stuff that I loved, notably Thurber but also Agatha Christie and some early sf like van Vogt, and also Vonnegut, that I remember, but I read a great deal more than that. I did quite like Salinger, but I preferred Franny and Zooey, which I still reread with great pleasure.

By the time I was in high school I was buying my own Harlan Ellison quite unchecked, and I found Dangerous Visions so upsetting that I had to put it under the bed with my collection of Japanese fairy tales -- there was one story in that book about a crab and a monkey that gave me nightmares for years. What got me about DV was the large percentage of stories best described as "horror." I never have liked horror. DV and the old orange fairy-tale book went into the same category as far as I was concerned.

Pamela

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, until I started buying them books, the folks mostly read from the library, so they didn't have a lot of their or my favorites on their shelves, and I was less than enthused about much of what I picked up at home.

It occurs to me that The Lord of the Rings might count as a grown-up book. I had it mentally categorized as an everybody book.

I never have liked horror, either, and I don't think it's a function of age at all.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

It's the one that came to my mind first. I think because of the ending; but other things too like the way the quest succeeds.

For me it was probably twelve which was when I started baby sitting. It that point, adult would have meant books I wasn't allowed to read. Now, I'm finding that a little harder to define.

For Em, I wouldn't restrict anything personally. It's more a question in my mind of what she would like, and the answers have me mulling that I really don;t know the answer to this.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I know I was reading McCaffrey at 10 or so, and I probably read Dune, the Mary Stewart Arthur books, and the Lord of the Rings books around then, too (and I think my mom gave me all of those). After that I continued to read some YA stuff, but mostly adult books. My elementary school library in 5th-6th grade actually had all of the Pern books, so that was cool. And the librarians at the city library liked me and never tried to stop me from checking out anything.

I remember getting thrown out of the adult section of the library when I was 4, but I think I was just looking for my mom. ;p

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I *think* the first non-YA or kids book I attempted to read was The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn. I *think* I got these from people who didn't know that "fantasy" wasn't just fairy tales... or they couldn't have been gifts from the same people who gave my siblings and me The Chronicles of Narnia. I remember getting two box sets--the Lewis books and the Tolkien books--at the same time and coveting them. I was in 3rd grade, I think.

I don't remember reading much in the way of YA, really. I was never interested in the typical stuff like the Beverly Cleary books or (later) the Sweet Valley High series. I remember in middle school everyone read the V.C. Andrews books because they had *gasp* incest and sex. I remember reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft before 6th grade, a lot of mythology collections (about Hercules, Jason & the Argonauts, Zeus and co.), and a lot of classics (yeah, I was an English subject geek. I loved to read) that weren't assigned.

I don't remember anyone ever telling me I was reading something too old, but I read a lot of books at the library. Since I wasn't checking them out, no one really knew what I was reading and so I could browse to my heart's content. I read a lot of early 80s horror, too, and have a special place in my heart for folks like Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, and Clive Barker (but this was kind-of middle school/early high school years).

I don't think there's anything I would keep away from my son, but I think I would start him with an appropriate book--appropriate meaning he already shows interest, the length is just right for him, and the topic is something he really likes. I think it's a "book by book" thing. And there are lots more options to choose from now than when I was 8 years old. It really depends on how much he understands about the world and consequences.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I got my chubby little mitts on a copy of "Watership Down" at 9 years old. After reading it I realized, somewhere in my childhood brain, that I had brushed against something bigger than the standard YA and children's books I'd been reading up to that point. Even at a young age I was aware that the fairytales and nursery rhymes I was reading had deeper meanings. The fact hat mother read to me from mythology texts when I was even younger probably had something to do with this early awareness. Of course, at 9 I was reading old college textbooks, especially the history books, and the Collier's Compound Encyclopedia, especially the mythology.

At 10 years old I picked up a copy of the Asimov's "The Stars Like Dust" because I thought the cover looked cool. I was stunned, and started raiding the adult's books in the house. Next stop was a book called "The Haven". This was were I slipped the tether and dashed full force into adult books. From there I found my way to Heinlein, Brackett, Moore, and other giants of the early SF&F period. I read anything I could find in the house: westerns, romances, mainline novels, spy thrillers, detective stories, it didn't matter. I was a word sponge, and tore through the family book collection at a disturbing rate.

At one point I was reading King's "Salem's Lot", and my mother decided to intervene. We sat down and discussed the book, its themes, its content, and the underlying story. Mum decided after our talk that I was perfectly capable of handling adult books at 10, and she subscribed me to the SF Book Club (we lived in a little rural community of 200 people at the time. The nearest bookstore was an hour away by car).

I guess I was always a little ahead of the curve in the reading department. While my classmates were struggling to make sense of See Spot Run, I was raiding the fourth grade home room for something interesting to read.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it's too difficult or too "adult" in ways she doesn't get, it'll probably bore her.

This was the case with me and Madeleine L'Engle (that is, M.L'E. has talked about how it was true for her, not that it was true for me with her books), so that's two data points, at least.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

When I was in the second grade, I had read everything on the children's floor of the library in my home town, and I got special permission to go upstairs and start choosing books from the adult floor.

When I was in the second grade, the school librarian found out what grade I was in, and took the Nancy Drew book out of my hands because it wasn't on the approved reading list for second graders. I went home in tears; my mother reacted by buying the entire series, second hand (even at 25 cents each, that was a lot of money for our family) and piling them all around my bed while I slept.

When I was in 6th grade, my mother took me to a used bookstore on our way to the beach, and I picked up a pile of books including The Erector Set and the Harrad Experiment. When the bookstore owner questioned whether they were appropriate, my mother said "I don't care what she reads, as long as she doesn't hide it under the mattress. Sell her the books."

When I was in 7th grade, I got sick, and having read every book I owned, started in on my dad's books. He had all the books the SF Book Club put out in 1951-53, and I read them all, good and better (and bad).

Hmmmm. I've never told my daughter she couldn't read a book (and I have books shelved in, literally, every room of my house that doesn't have a flush toilet in it -- and stacked in a couple that do). If she picks it up, she can read it. I do sometimes look through books before recommending them, according to some vague sense of appropriateness, but it has more to do with the me-recommending-ness of the situation than the her-reading.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

10 years old, Clan of the Cave Bear. That's the first one I remember; the feeling of accomplishment was completely based on its size. I suspect I'd read a few adult books already, but this one was big, and I had been obsessed with book size since the age of 6, when I used to thumb through my mother's Norton's Anthology of Poetry or whatever it's called and think "Wow. This is what [college/adulthood/nebulous non-word icon, since I didn't think it in words] is all about. BIG books."

I've gotten over the size thing, but frankly, length was an important factor in book selection for a long time, right up until I read The Thornbirds at age 13 and realized length was not always a mark of quality. (Not that I didn't like The Thornbirds, but I did find it lacking in characters I could identify with.)

And my mom only tried to restrict horror reading. She made me return juvenile horror to the library (Are You in the House Alone? was the title.) Which I thought was idiotic of her, but I was four pages in and thought it was stupid already, and I had a stack of other stuff, so I didn't argue.

I don't try to restrict my step-daughter's reading. Far from it. I wish she'd read more. I had doubts up until this year that she was reading with any real comprehension (when quizzed, she would come up with some very bizarre analyses of books which seemed based solely on the titles), and thus would direct her towards books with easier words and more direct excitement in the text (frustration is a powerful motivator for her (and many others), and she gives up easily, and I wanted to avoid having her feel reading was a frustration). But I never argued with her when she insisted on picking up Charlotte's Web every day for a month, even though I was pretty sure she wasn't comprehending a bit of it. Better to go through the motions than to not. Habits are born in a variety of weird ways.

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

I don't have a distinct memory of my first adult book - I can remember reading the hobbit at a youg age, but I'm not sure if that qualifies as a YA novel or not. And I know I was eating Agatha Christie books by age 10, and around that same time I read Jane Eyre. somewhere in that time I read Cujo, I believe. When I was really little I was reading the colored fairy books by Andrew Lang, and I'm not sure if that counts as adult reading or children's reading either. Theyre big books. there are some illustrations. but they're not "picture on every page" books.

The only time I can remember being told that I couldn't read something was the first day at the library at school, when we were told where to find books and how to take them out, and then we were supposed to pick out a book that we wanted - and then the librarian told me that I could not take the book I wanted, which was "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen.

I remember distinctly that I loved the stories in the Colored Fairy Books, but that The Little Match Girl disturbed me - it seemed like a fairy tale, but there was something *wrong* with it, and it seemed logical that reading more Andersen might help me to figure out what it was that was wrong. I was five, and I was starting grade one.

Anyway, the librarian told me I couldn't take that book out, because it was too old for me - in that it wasn't a book designed for someone who couldn't read yet. I told her that it was all right, that I could read, and that I'd read books lots harder than that one. (I don't recall exactly what I had read that would have been harder, but I was fairly confident that I had. I could have been thinking about the World Book encyclopaedia, which was a good way to shut me up for hours, or else I was thinking of a series of illustrated science textbooks we had.)

Well, not only did she not believe me, she was very angry with me for lying. I was five, and I was in grade one, and I had never gone to kindergarten - and by her lights, that meant that I couldn't read much more than Cat and Dog and Jack. She took the book away from me, and I was furious with her - i shouted at her to give that back, and pointed out to her that she said that I could take out any book I wanted, and that I wanted that one.

She told me not to be ridiculous, that I couldn't read. I snatched up the next book on the shelf, which was another copy, opened it up, and started reading out loud to her. I was shaking and at first it didn't come out so well with the lump around my throat, but I read it.

I got the book, and made an enemy. And I haven't recovered from it, either.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I have no particular memory of a first adult book. I never had trouble getting my hands on things I wanted to read, nobody tried to stop me.

I can't pin any specific reading experiences particularly before third grade (though I'm quite sure I was reading extensively much before then).

I know I read some of Gerald Durrell's books when I was 10. I believe I read Heinlein's Glory Road before then. (Gerald Durrell being Larry's more interesting younger brother.) Also Eric Frank Russell's Men, Martians, and Machines.

Unfortunately I don't remember when I first started reading Dorothy Sayers, either.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I started reading Dorothy Sayers when I was 23, and then I was indignant at the people who had given me Agatha Christie as representative of the mystery genre a decade or more earlier. I still don't understand why they would, when there's Sayers to be had.

[pameladean]

I do. I gave you a copy of GAUDY NIGHT in 1979.

Pamela

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That may have been the first time I read Gaudy Night, but it certainly was not the first time I read Sayers.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I don't think there was a hard-and-fast line between when I wasn't reading adult books and when I was. I know I read both Gone With the Wind and The Thorn Birds in fifth or sixth grade, so I was 9 or 10. I'm pretty sure I was reading Asimov's short stories and Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie well before then, and I know I read The Parents' Answer Book (on how to tell your children about sex) when I was 9 or so. So did all of the boys who came to my birthday party that year, in fact. I believed in reading all the parenting books my mother brought home from the library, just to make sure they didn't tell her to do anything awful to us.

It's also hard to know when the boundary was because I think there were a lot of abridged versions of adult classics around, like Les Miserable, that may or may not have been aimed at kids. Mom never restricted my reading and I had a much higher tolerance for boring writing when I was young so I read everything from Sydney Sheldon (someone's ibrary copy that was sitting on an umbrella table at the swim club) to cereal boxes on the table at breakfast.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I think the first book I got from the adult section of the library might have been part of a series that I started reading downstairs in the children's section. I haven't the slightest clue what that may have been though or when. I know I was reading Anne McCaffrey books (well?) before high school. I read Perelandra in either 7th or 8th grade, for a book report. That was the worst grade I ever got for a book report, because I completely skipped most of the dialoug and just read the "action" parts. I don't think I ever turned back though, once I started going into the adult section of the library. Of course, I had been stuck on the same two series in the YA section for quite a while too, so the lure of new material would have been very hard to overcome.
I don't think anyone ever stopped me from reading anything I wanted to. I know there were a couple books I put down because I didn't want to read them after a few chapters, but that may have been because they were just bad.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And your big brothers were not a bad influence?

Did you pass books around much when you were younger, or is it only now that you/we gift each other with stuff you've/we've liked?

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I don't recall much book passing going on. We did have a big "shared" bookcase between our bedrooms, but I don't remember ever trading library books around, or really, even being given something to read by someone else in the family. We did all share the Calvin and Hobbes comic books though...

Earliest Adult Book

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say that the only book I ever remember being told that my mother would prefer me not reading was the sequel to "The Clan of the Cave Bear" which I believe is "The Valley of the Horses." My mother didn't say I wasn't old enough, rather that she prefered that I not read the sexually explicit scenes. If it was much more explicit than "The Clan of the Cave Bear" I guess she was being consistant in that they didn't let me watch movies with anything close to that much sex in them. I was 11 and wasn't that bothered by it because there we plenty of other books to read. My father is a reading nut so any time I felt like finding a new book, I just had to search the shelves and since I can't devour books nearly as quickly as you do, M'ris, this covered a large amount of my reading needs. As far as adult books go, I can't draw a clear line because I just picked out whatever was in my folks library without a clear idea of the age of the book and before we could really read chapter books on our own, my mother read them aloud to us. The ones I remember were more YA style, but we read the "Little House on the Prarie" series, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn", and so forth and so on.

For our kids, we are currently reading to Siri "The Hobbit", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", and the Betsy-Tacy series. Gavin isn't quite there with the whole talking thing to be patient enough for a chapter book, but he sits with us sometimes when we're reading to Siri and seems to enjoy the whole reading thing.

Heathah

adult reading material

[toolittletime.livejournal.com]

Not sure if they were adult or not, but clearly remember reading several of Asimov's books in 2nd grade - and many other science related fiction & non-fic. My parents never restricted what I read, on the theory that if it was "too old" for me, I wouldn't understand it anyway. But librarians often needed to get parental approval for things I wanted to check out - like college level chemistry & algebra texts when I was in 4th or 5th grade.

As a parent, I always felt that my kids could read anything in the house and practically anything elsewhere. And in general that policy worked well, although my daughter did keep a plain white cover over "The Harrad Experiment" (maybe for my benefit, maybe so the teacher didn't choke) and I kept Phil Farmer's "Image of the Beast/Blown" toward the back of the bookcase (multiple rows of paperbacks) - there are some questions I'd still have trouble answering for a kid. And of course my son, the political animal, often had teachers reject his intended extra-curricular reading even in high school. But teachers like that are worth ignoring mostly.

-kd

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I don't really remember a firm dividing line. I know that by the time I was 11 or so, I was routinely shopping in the "grown-up" SF section in bookstores, and had already developed something of a habit of raiding my parents' bookshelves for interesting non-fiction. (I remember very much amusing my father by reading my way through a small stack of his management advice books - things like "The One Minute Manager" and so forth. I think I was trying to understand just what it was Daddy did all day.)

I don't think that any adult ever tried telling me that a book was "too old" for me more than once. Because such statements never deterred me from reading a book - quite the opposite. I do remember my mother occasionally remarking to me that I might find a particular book "difficult" or "disturbing" and that if I had questions about it I should feel free to ask her.

I do remember the first time I tried to read a Stephen King novel, I decided all on my own that it was too icky, and I took it back to the library. I was 12 at the time.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I started reading them at about 8, from my mom's shelves. It was gradual -- I kept on reading YA, and still do, though the proportions finished shifting at about 14.

I progressed from the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings. I think that was first, but there was also a lot of Asimov, Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, Edding's Belgariad when I was 12 or so -- are those considered adult books? Anne McCaffrey. The Christie mysteries, a bunch of reader's digest condensed books and Danielle Steels 'cause that was all my grandmother had, Heinlein, Clan of the Cave Bear... those were the early ones. I can't remember anyone I cared about telling me I was too young for them. Certainly not anyone I would have listened to. I do think I was too young to read Catcher in the Rye, though -- I found Holden completely silly and annoying.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yep, the ones you listed are generally shelved in adult sections. Incarnations of Immortality in particular would be hard to get shelved as YA, I think: God is being replaced? And by a female? Good heavens, we can't have that!

It's entirely possible that you were too old to read The Catcher in the Rye. I think some books really have to hit people at exactly the right age.

[(Anonymous)]

I read "Hawaii" by James Mitchner when I was 9. My mother had to explain to me what "rape" was. Then when I was 10, I read "Up the Down Staircase" at least a dozen times; the few sexual references were over my head, but I think I understood the rest.

The only book anyone ever tried to keep me from reading when I was a child was "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." My mother forbade it presumably because of the suicide attempt toward the beginning. She also didn't want me to see the movie "Psycho," also presumably for the gore factor. Of course, I did read that book and see that movie, albeit years later ... Mazal

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Up the Down Staircase was for grown-ups? Oh. Huh. I never knew that.

I read Hawaii when I was just-turned-13; it was my one and only Michener. My mom tried to interest me in Space. No dice.

[landofnowhere]

Hello, I'm a random person who's been following Novel Gazing. It's so odd, because I can't think of what my first adult book was... I'm 18, and still frequent the YA section at the library: most of the adult books I read are non-fiction. I guess I've been reading adult popular math/science books since I was 9, even, but I don't really think that's what you're talking about. Still, it's been a long time since it's felt unusual for me to read adult fiction. My mom gave me The Mists of Avalon when I was 11, but I only got through the first 100 pages or so, still I rememeber the sex scenes. And she read me classics (Great Expectations, Emma, Jane Eyre) when I wasn't much older. Oh, yeah, and after my big Narnia kick she read me the first two thirds of the Space Trilogy when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I remember when I was 9, I wanted to write a biographical piece on Catherine the Great to submit to New Moon magazine, and they didn't have any biographies in the kids section, so I went to the adult section and selected three fat books on them. My mom looked through them and decided that only one or two of them was appropriate for me. For some reason, this turned me off the project and I ended up not reading any of them, although I did write a piece using the encyclopedia as a reference. Hm, what else? I've acted in Shakespeare since I was 10, although that was generally abridged. (Still, I didn't quite get what was going on with Hermia and Lysander arguing about whether to share a mossy couch asleep in the forest.)

I feel there's probably some book I'm missing, but I'll leave things at that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hi! You do MathCounts stuff -- MathCounts rocks!

Ahem. Anyway. I think the fact that you didn't do the project is one reason I would be very careful censoring a future spawn's reading material: it can very easily turn them off an interest or even (though obviously not in your case) off reading.

(Although Catherine the Great in particular did have a few, ah, proclivities that I can see might cause a parent trouble. And was rumored to have a few more.)