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

[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.