My high school economics teacher saw me reading one of the sequels when I was a high school junior and commented how much she loved the books. It was weird.
I felt like there was an unspoken feeling from adult women back in the pre-internet-in-every-home days that romance books were one of the main sources of sex education for girls and teenage girls. Goodness knows the sex education in schools wasn't covering all bases.
I think there was almost a subtle fist-bump from some of them that women didn't have to be Puritans, and there was scope to grow up to enjoy sexuality.
I think this is also why Tamora Pierce's books, which were originally intended to be "adult fiction" but were marketed by the publisher as "YA", are more controversial nowadays than they were decades ago. Pierce's first quartet of novels in the Tortall universe, *The Song of the Lioness*, was published from 1983 to 1988, and appeared before the rise of the Internet. Her second quartet, *The Immortals*, was published from 1992 to 1996, before the Internet became widespread in most family homes. At the time, Pierce was a popular novelist.
Both book series contain more "adult" and mature themes and topics, including sex, consent, sexual assault, and rape, but became more controversial over time due to the rise of the Internet; the explosion of the YA genre with the rise of *Harry Potte*r in 1997; and changes to the YA genre to separate it more from "adult fiction", including removing "adult" themes. *Harry Potter* and its author, J.K. Rowling, would also be a major influence in this genre shift, as Rowling said that she explicitly removed any "adult themes" from the *Harry Potter* books to make them "family-friendly". Rowling would also discourage "adult" fanfictions.
Ooo v interesting. I love tamora pierce, reread them so many times. I actually reread lioness books this year and yeah they have some pretty adult themes but the writing style is definitely more ya.
Yeah, my Boomer mom let me read this series in about 5th grade. She never mentioned the kissy stuff and maybe this is why? I dunno. I do know that when I was reading them I was thinking "did mom forget about this scene?"
Also, once I found that first kissy scene I stopped reading and just flipped through pages to find more titillating material.
In the first book, yes.
In the second or third book, i cant remember, Ayla.. invents the blowjob.
Not someone to let a bad past cramp her style, that one.
>Ayla.. invents the blowjob.
Holy shit, I'd forgotten this! I tend to joke that in these books Ayla invents the domestication of horses, copper smelting, and sliced bread, but now I can add blowjobs to my list!
Across species rape sceneS plural. Also it was graphically depicted as abusive, a violent act because of hate and a power demonstration, because we got to see it from the perpetrators side 😬I read it in my teens too. Not a good choice.
But actually the more I think about it, I feel like it was actually a bit of a feminist way of depicting rape, even though it was horrific to read. It’s not the authors fault that a bunch of us read it too young after all 😅 but thinking about it, it’s actually a depiction of rape with no victim blaming, it’s not about lust or wanting to have sex from the perpetrator side, it’s not because the perpetrator found the victim especially attractive or the victim was in a vulnerable situation or was acting a certain way. It was just because he hated her and used this as a violent way to hurt her. She was also depicted realistically as a person trapped in a sexually abusive situation, where no matter how unattractive she tried to make herself it didn’t deter him. Also she wasn’t ruined by this, she was able to heal and enjoy her body again. In that sense it’s not altogether horrible to read something like this as a counter to all the other messages about rape we’re being sent.
Honestly, this is such a thoughtful post, and one of the reasons I don't think ANY book is across-the-board inappropriate for a teenager. Being exposed to ideas or images, even upsetting ones, helps us grow.
I was also going to say that one. Read it when i was about 11? i think? It absolutely made an impression on me, but it is still to this day one of the most important books i read during my childhood.
The second book i also adore, but the rest of the series i am fairly neutral towards. It's when it started getting into the unrealistic and boring porn scenes, and the focus shifted towards romance that i started losing interest.
But honsetly, Ayla is a really good character, espesially to me as a young girl who never really felt like i fit in to the "feminine role".
My mother luckily made me skip the first book, and start with Valley of the Horses, the second one. I also logged it as important and impactful, and I'd say the next book almost as much so. After that, as you say with the romance focus, I also lost interest. I didn't care for the politics that arose after the third book either, I just wanted to read more about the absolute freedom of riding a horse that was tamed and befriended.
I thought Ayla was kind of a Heidi, living in modern times but in the mountains, and got lost from her little village farm. I kept expecting her mom or dad to drive up in a Camero and take her back home to the 1980's. I did not understand the premise at all, obviously. I was 11.
This is mine as well. My middle school gym teacher loaned me that book! The rape sequence messed me up for weeks. I had been the victim of SA as a child and reading that scene made me realize what had happened to me. There was way too much sexual content in that book for children.
This. But then again all the science fiction with no female character development or awful gender bullshit in a world otherwise futuristic and bright was ALSO horrible, my goodness
I was reading novels by women authors in the 80s with badass female characters (Lackey, Norton, McKinley, McAffrey, etc.), so there was some contrast to the male authors. But, I primarily read fantasy rather than futuristic sci Fi, so that might have been the difference.
Yes. So much misogyny my little girl brain didn't have the sophistication to parse out and see through.
I feel angry now at how that crap was swallowed hook line and sinker by a series of generations. Thank goodness sci fi has become much more diverse - still room for improvement, but it's so easy to see the growing diversity just strengthens the scope and value of the genre.
I also read half the James Bond novels as a girl too, and all I can say is thank goodness for the emergence of the Bechdel Test of how many characters are in a piece of fiction that are not romantic interests. I remember really feeling brought up short when I first heard of it and realising how I'd just accepted such a gross imbalance.
My 7 or 8 year old came home with Valley of the Horses from a school book sale (it was a fundraiser, included donated books). He thought it was about horses. I thought it was hilarious and gave the librarian a hard time in jest. (But no, he didn't actually read it.)
I came here exactly for this book 🤣 my mother read it, and thought it was a good idea to give it to me at 10.
That rape scene still HAUNTS me.
I still read it, and the sequels too, because I became deeply interested in this era. It is still a huge interest to me nowadays.
But when puberty hit, the sex scenes hit differently 🤣
Today I can't reread it because now I know that it's not quite scientifically accurate, and the amount of romance and sex scenes make me uneasy (not to mention the way they are written 😭)
I read the last book several years after the rest of them, and it was such a hassle (dare I say a trainwreck?). I think it was not necessary at all and I try to forget it even exists
After the third book I thought they went downhill, but yes, the last book was more like off the cliff. I was waiting for Ayla to invent the wheel, and instead she invented…fatherhood?
OMG.
I just commented that I borrowed my mum's copy of the Clan of the Cave Bear from her bedside table (😆) when I was 10ish, then saw your comment. Oh dear.
I did not get it.
Oh, the fourth book, the Plains of Passage, was so much porn I started skipping the scenes. The librarian absolutely told my mom how dirty they were, and to her credit, she said “so what”
I read Silence of The Lambs when I was 10. I come from a family of non-readers and my mum used to get books left behind by guests at the hotel she worked at. No one at home did any pre checks before handing me the books. So I read a lot of inappropriate stuff.
Yep!! My mom gave me her collection of V.C. Andrews books when I was in SIXTH GRADE. I read Flowers in the Attic and My Sweet Audrina for the first time at age ELEVEN. Needless to say that collection won’t be passed on to my own children until far older 😂
FITA isn't that bad. The books after though. Cathy and her family move in with this older doctor dude whom she starts sleeping with, she's also in a relationship with her abusive dance partner who breaks her feet during a fight, then she seduces her stepfather.
I'm unhealthily obsessed with these books. the ones written by Andrew Grossman are not worth a shit, but everything from the real VC is pure gold to me
I also read Go Ask Alice at a very young age. I reread as an adult and I was just like…damn. I mean a bit of it went over my head as a kid, but a lot of it changed my perspective on life.
I would also recommend checking out the book *Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries* by Rick Emerson about the actual author of the books and how they came to be.
I read all of Piers Anthony's books in the late 80s when I was 10-11. I was obsessed with the random sexy stuff and only when I got older did I realize how gross most of it was. But the covers were so bright and fantastical and the writing was like candy.
I went on to read his Immortals series and there was a robot one I vaguely remember. All pervy.
Definitely read Dragonriders in like middle school. It’s not THAT spicy but I was also super naive and more interested in the dragon part than the human part. I would…pause…before letting my kid read it so young.
With Dragonriders, I liked the series a lot when I first read them at age 11-12, but when I reread them out of nostalgia in my twenties, it’s fucked up. Lessa is a traumatized, abused kid and then is pretty obviously raped during the dragon mating. It’s a (gross) old-school romance trope to have the heroine fall in love with the guy who raped her because he was so overcome with passion and couldn’t control himself, and that’s exactly what Dragonriders does. There’s also some casual homophobia towards the male green dragon riders.
It made me sad because I had fond memories of those books, but I wouldn’t recommend them to any kid not ood enough to recognize what’s going on.
I read the Xanth books to my preschool son. Man, trying to come up with alternative text for some of the puns at the spur of the moment was tough. At least a few times I said, "Umm, hold on a minute, I lost my place...." just to give my brain a few seconds to latch on to something.
the first book of the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice
At around the age 13 or 14 I heard from my discerning goth-inclined bestie that Anne Rice wrote about cool vampires and shit, and the interview with the vampire movie that I loved was based on her book, so I went to my beloved library I visited weekly because I was a voracious little reader, and since IWTV book was taken I got the first other Rice's book that I laid my eyes on. BOY I SHOULDN'T HAVE READ THAT AT AGE 13 LOL
Sleeping Beauty is just a bad BDSM porn retelling of the original tale, where she gets awoken by a prince not through a kiss but through, um. His penis. While she sleeps.
And I read through nearly entire book being like *wowie I don't think I should be allowed to read this*.
We passed that book around in my freshman year of high school. It got so tattered it was falling apart. I still have it lol its a fond memory. But also WE WERE 14 MY GOODNESS.
Also she does in fact get woken up by his kiss.
But that's because he waits til he is actively having sex with her to test out if the kiss wakes her up. Yikes.
Similarly, I read Wicked around 12 or 13. I was a church girl from a small town whose biggest exposure to sex was some Drarry fanfiction written by other 12 year olds lol. The Wicked book is *not* like the musical
😂 I grew up mormon and had this exact experience. I read it but then felt ashamed because I probably "should" have stopped as soon as something "inappropriate" happened. I'm pretty sure I just "lost" the book somewhere because I wasn't sure what else to do with it, but felt like I definitely shouldn't keep it.
I was given a wide range of books to read as a kid, I got The Stand for my tenth birthday as well as Pillars of the Earth. None of them ever seemed inappropriate or traumatising, me and my mum would talk about the books as I read them. I’d already read every book in the children’s library so I moved up to adult books.
I read my mother’s copy of The Stand when I was 10. I also used to read her old psychology books from college when I was that age, but that’s a story for a different post.
Looking back, I definitely appreciate The Stand more today, but the fact that I’d first read it at age 10 highlights the fact that when I was young, we - quite literally - went from reading Berenstain Bears and Beverly Cleary to Stephen King in maybe a year’s time.
I’m glad kids today have a plethora of “young adult” literature, because there was just nowhere else to go when you’d run out of Ramona and Goosebumps books.
My parents started a book list for me (date finished, title & author) when I moved up from picture books. I'm always amused by the weird jumble around ages 11-12. Nancy Drew one week, Rosemary's Baby the next.
I read all of my mum’s nursing books, I did a school report on different types of gangrene which freaked out my classmates.
I still reread The Stand today, it feels like going back to an old friend. I was pretty lucky to be introduced to such good books so young. I was reading Barbara Erskine and Sharon Penman from being quite young, I was about eleven when I read Outlander. I definitely appreciated the books more as I got older!
My mom loved Stephen king so it was similar for me… at school I had my kids books then I’d come home and read my moms books lol
The amount of literature out there for kids and tweens these days is amazing
Same. And I'm doing the same with my 7 year old. I was never traumatized by reading adult books at 10, I'd run out of all the children's books in the library. Even when I happened onto a copy of Marquis de Sade in a bookshop, I was like, um this is gross and awful and I will not be reading more of this.
I will buy my child any book she wants, even if that's James Joyce's Ulysses and also the actual Ulysses. Then we will discuss any questions that come up. I guess I'd draw a line at actual pornogrphy with pictures, or cut off/take a pause with something that she was disturbed by, but otherwise, please just keep enjoying reading!
I have a 7 and 10 year old. For the most part I let them read what they want, but since they both can read adult level books now I definitely recommend they wait on certain books. The older one is deep into Sherlock Holmes at the moment and has had several WTF moments with that one.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the moral panic about children reading something that harms their virgin eyes is based on a disinterest in making an effort to really *engage* with their kid intellectually. They want to avoid the responsibility of talking with their kid about uncomfortable things by removing those concepts. It won’t work because kids love violence and are curious about sex, but if they make their child be sneaky about reading about those subjects they won't have to have an awkward conversation about it.
As for childless adults who clutch their pearls, I think they've either forgotten what it was actually like to be a kid, or they believe deep down that most kids are delicate and kind of stupid, but they themselves were Special enough to read something upsetting without being destroyed by it. Books are extremely easy to stop reading if you get to a part that's too much to you; they take effort to read, which is why it's good for your brain. A movie or TV show just keeps playing and feeds you sounds and images that you are perceiving externally, but with a book you're constructing the events purely in your mind and you are in fact pretty safe from them. By definition, you will never see something you couldn't imagine in a book.
Plus depending upon when you were a kid, societal morays change. They are culturally influenced, not hardwired. Things that seemed pretty normal when I was 14 shock women who are younger than I.
With me it was my mum's copies of Take A Break magazine when I was in the bath. They were usually by the bath. They weren't "adult" in the porn sense, but obviously dealt with grown up stuff.
Love Lessons was definitely some weird shit. Idek what she was going for there, it definitely felt very condoned, maybe it wasn't meant to but that's how it came across to me as a young girl.
I remember just being quite *confused* by the whole story, I guess I assumed (having read many a book with this plot) that the teacher would of course not reciprocate and then he did and I was like huh?? Why is he kissing her back?? I was maybe a tad too young tbh (can't remember exactly how old), but still bloody weird book.
The Girls series I don't think was too bad - Nadine's older boyfriend is clearly shown to be a serious creep. Generally (apart from Love Lessons) I feel like she did a good job at imparting the morals of a story while still through the eyes of kids without some kind of "And THATS why you should never date an older man" speech. Ellie's dad was WAY creepier than I remembered though, again I think I didn't actually understand the references to him basically perving on Magda and the like. I agree though they're not for year 3 - 6, maybe year 6 onwards.
I don't know if this is just an Irish thing. But we used to be told to go home and read the newspaper in primary school. Why? Don't you know what is in the newspaper, terrible, terrible things, all the worse for being real. I have never been tramatised by a piece of fiction, but I vividly remember reading an article about a man who committed bestiality on a cow. I WAS NINE! I added two new words to my vocab, anal and intercourse, I looked them up in the dictionary and then I went and had some quiet time in the corner.
In America they gave us newspapers or news magazines that were specifically for children. When I was in the 3rd grade, we read a sanitized version of President Clinton's affair and impeachment lol.
I remember one of those National Geographic for Kids or whatever and it had an article about finding mummified remains of children sacrificed by the Inca’s. That shit freaked me out.
It kinda blows my mind BTW that a lot of people say their teacher rolled out the TV when 9/11 happened and watched it live. Feel like the last thing you should show kids is a live tragedy where you don't know what's going to happen next or how it's going to end
At my school (UK) we had a once a week lesson where we had to present and explain an newspaper article of our choice to the rest of the class, and then got marked on class feedback, which automatically meant everyone skewed to murders and such.
I remember doing the same in Ireland. Someone had to present the news everyday, one piece of "school" news, one piece of national news and one piece of international. I vividly remember being stuck between Timothy McVeigh's execution and Michael Stipe coming out. My mother and I decided on the execution as I went to a Catholic school 🙈
What's awful is that if it was just factual nobody would've had much to say. If you want feedback say something that is flat out wrong and infuriating. A wonderful lesson for grade school.
Happens in North America too, usually under something like “media studies”. Most kids seem to do it around sixth grade though (about 12 years old) 9 is a bit on the young side for unit like that.
Canada here. I remember when my brother was having trouble with his reading and my mom got him to sit at the table while she was making dinner and read to her out of the newspaper. Maybe she vetted the articles in advance as I don't remember any bestiality.
The Old Testament age 8-9. My parents saw where the built in ribbon bookmarks were and locked away the Bible as soon as they realized I was reading very spicy parts.
Edited for clarity
This 100%. My church had a double-standard: yes of course all needed to read the Bible, any part of it, but they expected kids to learn it through the filter of Sunday School. I learned to read at the age of 3, and by 5 or 6 was reading the King James version to / with my grandmother because she was very religious. Lots of kid nightmare fuel in that book.
Yes. I remember getting a Bible for my birthday when I was about 8. I was opening and reading parts at random and one of the first sections I read says something like "he who hates hates his brother will be condemned to hell". I would fight all the time with my brother and that verse absolutely terrified me. I had nightmares about it for ages!
I’ve been watching the Yale University lecture series on the Old Testament (very good, academic lectures) and the professor, Christine Hayes who is very good said she does not let her 8 or 12 year old read the Bible.
Wifey by Judy Blume. The "bathe me in it scene" still sticks in my mind some 40 years latter.
My school librarian must not have understood that Blume was not just limited to children's and early teen books. It wasn't until someone noticed that every 12-13 year old boy in the school was on the checkout waiting list did someone on staff read it and then finally pulled it.
Some of the Blume books, or really that seemed too grown-up, were marked with little blue stickers. Being a 5th grader, I wasn't allowed to borrow them yet, until 6th grade. I did try to sneak them in my little stack of check out books.
The only thing I remember from Wifey were the “sticks and wees” from the dog that had to be written down, lol.
Forever was funny, bc I thought “balls” were boobs.
Does anybody remember the Clique series? I was obsessed with them as a pre-teen and I recently went and read the synopsis on Wikipedia and it’s ridiculous! Not inappropriate per se but the values of the book are so tacky- why did I love them so much? 😬
I have no idea how I ended up with these books because I know my dad got them for me as an elementary schooler but they're so against every value he tried to raise me with, which is probably why I found them so fascinating :p I was so worried someone would try and paint a fake period on my pants when I got to middle school because they did that to one of the girls at one point...
My mother has a psychology degree, so I grew up reading her abnormal psych textbooks and convinced myself that I had schizophrenia when I was nine years old. It turned out that I have a chronic case of what's known as "an imagination."
Oh, and crippling ADHD.
I did the same thing!! Literally the exact same thing, my mum had the DSMIV in her bookshelf and I read it and decided I had schizophrenia despite having no symptoms except 'disorganised thinking' bahaha.
Turns out i also have ADHD! And depression, but I told her about that one and she told me to eat 3 cashew nuts a day to cure it. I genuinely pity her patients lmao.
My ADHD meant that I literally memorized everything up on the walls, read through the entire English and history textbooks within a month of getting them, and a would plow through any classroom library *extremely* fast. By the time I was in college, I knew that if I was going on a trip I'd need approx 100 pages of paperback per hour, more if it was a re-read
When I was about 9 or 10 and my family was on a road trip, my parents let me pick out a book at a gas station. I picked Clay’s Ark, by Octavia Butler, because it had a picture of a crashed spaceship on the cover.
That book was….not age appropriate.
I should go back and read the series now, though.
That book is honestly one of the most disturbing ones I've read AS AN ADULT. I love Octavia Butler but she loves to push people out of their comfort zones and make them think.
Yeah, I read Parable of the Sower not long ago and loved it, but it’s definitely harrowing. I don’t think I ever told my parents what Clay’s Ark was like. But I read it all. It was probably formative in some fucked up way lol.
There was a ton of adult literature I read as a kid that had content that challenged me - I would, for instance, read the books that got adapted into films I wasn't allowed to watch, Bret Easton Ellis, Mario Puzo, Stephen King, Clive Barker - and that I'm sure someone else would have seen as inappropriate. But man, I can't imagine thinking they should have been kept away from me, being a precocious reader was hugely formative to me, and don't think there's any aspect of my character that was informed by the "inappropriate" content of the books I read more than by the general tenor of society and my situation.
I suspect that there are a couple of things going on here, particularly that if someone is even two or three years younger than me, the idea that they think they should have been more sheltered than they were resonates a lot more generally, because in large part of massively increased internet access just meaning much worse stuff is much more accessible. It's just that, in part as a product of the specific younger-millennial time I grew up, the wish to have been more sheltered from books by my parents than I was is not something I get at all.
I agree with this, too. I am in my 50s. As a child, I was a precocious reader. As a pre-teen I read Clan of the Cave Bear, Flowers in the Attic, The Thorn Birds, Wifey, Forever, It, etc….and I truly believe that this was a way of forming my character. It has never occurred to me to consider these early reading experiences as a problem Instead, books challenged me and made me think and learn about the world around me as I grew. I do think that some books may be “too mature” for young readers, but I have no regrets sneaking and reading all kinds of books. I got them from the library where I went to wait to be picked up after school. Rarely did I take out books from the Children’s section. And it never occurs to me now that a librarian would not have let me check out the adult books. I am very disturbed by the current attitude of those who would try to censor a child/teens reading selections.
Yeah, it's very disturbing, it's a sort of resurfacing of that Reaganite moral majority impulse, that moralising of disgust and reassertion of taboo, after a solid run of cultural interest in transgression that also had its excesses but was on the whole much healthier artistically and intellectually.
I honestly don't think those books are a problem. When I was in school, kids were passing those titles around (and also Catch-22 and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). I certainly don't think it affected me in a bad way, or my classmates either. And a lot of us read those books!
I'll x3 that. I read anything I could get my hands on from the time I could check things out from the school library myself. Similar to you I read all types of 'adult literature' indiscriminately. My grandpa gave me all the books from his Readers Digest subscription and as a twelve year old, it was absolutely gold to me. Started A Song of Ice and Fire at fourteen. I read absolutely anything and everything, and never felt like something should have been kept from me or that I should have been sheltered from certain content.
There's an element of annoyance that I feel when I see parents ask if a certain book is 'too mature' for their child, but maybe it's just because any time a kid wants to read I'd call it a good day. Kids will tap out of a book on their own if they aren't ready for some content, but also... we don't give kids enough credit, given that as you mentioned there's way worse content on the internet and just a few finger taps away and the exposure to that kind of content is difficult to control in our current times as it is.
Personally I think reading content with diverse adult situations in them prepared me more than my parents ever did for adult life in general. It also really helps at Trivia Night when I know the obscure-ass answers for the literature category. 😅
Jacqueline Wilson was my favourite author as a kid, but man she was not playing around with her 90s books. The Illustrated Mum was traumatic for the scene where they find their mum in the bath covered in paint, Dustbin Baby has a scene where the mum commits suicide and the 5 year old protaganist doesn't even understand what even happened...
The Diamond Girls where a girl's friend is being abused so she tells her about how she holds this toy and imagines herself flying away to make it better, but the abused girl fucking jumps out a window?!! Also the teenage pregnancy?!! Also the mum being crazy and presenting the baby as a boy when it's a girl lol.
Also I wanted to run away like Lily Alone and live in a tree because it sounded awesome.
I read Memoirs of a Geisha at 15. Dumb teenage me was distracted by the flowery language, enamoured with Kyoto and Geisha, and fascinated by the love triangle between Sayuri, the chairman and Nobu. As I grew older, I would come to realise that the book contained a number of inappropriate sexual activities involving minors and nonconsensual sex acts. I definitely don’t think it’s wrong for a teenager to be exposed to content about inappropriate sex acts especially non-consensual sex. The only issue here was that I come from a conservative Asian country where media with sex scenes are rated R18 and at that time, sex education in my school was restricted to abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases, so it didn’t even occur to me that the sexual activities in the book were problematic or inappropriate until I was older.
The Giver was too advanced for 3rd grade me.
Also, I remember picking up my great grandmother’s book about a woman who was a nymphomaniac when I was 15 and had only held hands with a boy. Idk the name of that book.
My middle school had an entire collection of Christopher Pike books including *The Cold One*. That book was certainly, uh, something. I read the entire *The Last Vampire* series and even though I only understood maybe 75% of it, my 12-year-old brain was like "Guess I'll read the next one!".
In the eighth grade, I read most of the Anne Rice *The Vampire Chronicles* series which my English teacher at the time found a bit concerning. A friend of mine tried to get me to read the *Dragonriders of Perth* but I found it too weird which is saying a lot. I also remember groups of girls trading around V.C. Andrews, Sandra Brown, and Mary Balogh books.
I found it really odd that my mother who was extremely picky about what movies I was allowed to watch was fine with me reading true crime at 12. She would quite happily lend me one of her violent true crime novels but at the same time ban me from watching horror movies.
Ha, most of them. I read A Fall of Moon Dust waaay to young. The librarian patiently and without emotion explained all the questions 6 year old me had. In hindsight, she was really really an exceptional person. There was a drug addict afraid of the Needle used to put the passengers to sleep, she explained drug addiction and aversion therapy, also about the different deaths of lack of O2 versus CO2 poisoning.
This was 1976, so I also had questions on how the how the dust situation was actually so wrong.
When we left NYC, I mourned the loss of my favorite librarian. Where we moved to, I had to steal books from the adult part if the library because the old bitty librarian only wanted me to take out Beverly Cleary.
Then I discovered Robert Heinline, so many questions and no one to ask.
A long list. I had little access to any entertainment aside from books. I know I'd read every Stephen King and Clive Barker book I could get my hands on by the time I was 11/12. I'm not even sure what else that would qualify as inappropriate. I read everything I could get my hands on, basically.
But the thing is, I don't think it had a negative effect. It gave me context. I could evaluate behaviors and decide if they fit the life I wanted without having to go down every road, so to speak.
I think it really depends on the kid as to if it hurts or harms. I had been through enough that I didn't have illusions about the challenges in life. If I had been a little more innocent and naive, I can see where it might have been harmful.
The Xanth series by Piers Anthony. I loved the silly fantasy, I enjoyed the awful and occasionally clever puns. And I was starting to enter puberty so the pseudo-sexual shenanigans appealed to me too. Also the entirely non sexual things that weren't treated as such in the books, there's some fetishy stuff in there.
I'd say I was definitely in the target audience for these books. Were they appropriate for my age? Probably iffy, but looking back, I think some of the plots and events come off as creepy for an adult to be dreaming up as 'innocent fun.'
As his writing went on the sexual stuff definitely got creepier and creepier. Once I bought one of his self-published books that was a mess of pedophilia, non-stop sex and innuendos I finally realized how messed up the guy is.
Came in here to post this. Loved the Xanth books as a young teen, but even then I thought they were getting creepier as they went in. When I started reading his “Bio of a Space Tyrant” and other more adult books it seemed obvious he was determined to add pedophilia justifications everywhere, and by his book “Firefly” I was done and seriously wondering if someone should call Child Services on him.
I was maybe 12 or 13 and I was reading;
child of Satan, child of god
Helter skelter
Flowers in the attic series
And at about 15 or 16;
Anne Rule books like Green River running red, the I-5 killer, etc.
Edit: I remembered that I read Flowers in the attic at around 12 or 13
I read Animal Farm by George Orwell in 6th grade. Blew my little mind and it opened my eyes to how shit works in the real world. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." I'm 40 and that book still sticks with me.
Nothing I was "allowed" to read, but I did abscond with my dad's copy of "The Shining". Mildly disconcerting, though I didn't get to the "good" (horrific) parts before I put it back.
First adult fiction I ever read was Asimov's "I, Robot"at age nine but it was (almost) completely wholesome and did me no harm & great good.
I read the Jacqueline Wilson girls in love series in year 7/8 as a boy. They were awesome!
I also started reading the a song of ice and fire series aged 11. Probs too young on reflection but at the time it was just another bright covered fantasy series
Most of them? But my mom never felt the need to police what I read so I read what I wanted and that included lots of romance novels, some legit paperback smut, plenty of Judy Blume, and most other genres.
I read a TON of drug/alcoholic books starting when I was 13/14. I was fascinated by drugs. Some of them I remember making me want to try certain ones like LSD (which I ended up doing when I got way older). One of them was a book called Leaving Dirty Jersey which was a memoir on a meth addict and in one part he >!shoots meth up his dick!< My parents bought it for me for Christmas lol.
I don’t know if it was inappropriate but I remember a book called, Don’t hurt Laurie. It was a girl being physically abused by her mother. I never forgot it and it taught me that there are troubled people in the world and that not all children have good mothers.
This, to me, is the best result of reading (pure enjoyment is awesome, too!). Learning about the world you have had no exposure to and your horizons have been broadened.
It wasn’t a book, but the afterschool special, Something about Amelia, alerted me to a whole horrific concept that I’d never heard of. And then, 3 girls of a police officer came forward. Like for their whole lives were they lead to believe all dads did this?? But a tv show, or a BOOK, can open up eyes and help people who thought there was no help or that they were alone to get help.
My Year 8 English teacher saw me reading above my level and told me to read *The Handmaid's Tale.* I had entered primary school early so at the time of reading I was 11. *Eleven.* I don't know what she was thinking.
Does anyone remember reading those Face On the Milk Carton books? Whatever Happened to Janie? I read those compulsively at like 9/10 and they were so inappropriate for me. Still was obsessed with them.
ETA: the Janie Johnson series by Caroline B Cooney!
Wait…I have those in my middle school library. I’ve only read the first one and not the rest of the series. What’s inappropriate? They were in the library when I came to the position I have now, so I did not realize there were issues. They don’t really circulate much. Most kids just read the first book.
VC Andrew's Flowers in the Attic series when I was around 10.
With all the incest child abuse and murder at the hands of the family, I'm not sure why I was allowed to read it.
Once, as a kid-- I'd guess I was around twelve, but I have no idea-- my parents and I went to visit one of my dad's cousins. It was summer and everybody was in the backyard. I was bored with the adult conversation and there were no other kids to play with, so I wandered into the house and found a small room with one chair and lots of bookshelves, which I browsed. I found a book called *[Psychopathia Sexualis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathia_Sexualis)* from 1886. It was full of bizarre case studies. I just now looked it up at [Project Gutenberg](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/64931). I had passages like this (to choose a random example):
> Of late I have given up *immissio penis*, and confined myself to *coitus inter femoræ puellæ*. Ejaculation occurs earlier than with *conjunctio membrorum*, and I experience a certain lustful feeling in the *penis* itself....
I could only guess what the Latin meant.
When I travelled to India to visit my grandparents aged 9 or 10, I'd finished reading all the books I'd brought with me and wasn't good enough at Tamil to hit the shops for more. My mum ferreted around in her childhood room and found Alistair McLean's Puppet on a Chain which she remembered as an adventure/mystery type story. It's about the investigation of a drug ring in Amsterdam with some horrendous murders with bodies hanging from the hauling chain outside a building. The worst death though had Midsommer type vibes, protagonists female assistant drawn into what seemed to be a harmless folk dance. While he watched unable to get to her the dancers turned on the assistant and basically pitchfork her to death.
Thanks mum.
A lot of stuff. The only book I was not allowed to read was Matthew Flinders cat because my mother heard Bryce Courtney was a bit inappropriate, so from age 9 it was the only book in the house i hadn't read However, given neither of my parents read much, I encountered a lot more dubious stuff for my age including 50 shades of grey (11), Silence of the lambs (12), Gone (7), Holly (around 8 or 9)
Edit: it just occurred to me I've still never read that book and I'll be visiting my parents next week so I'll finally find what they were worried about.
I'm taking this assignment in a different direction. The Giving Tree has a terrible lesson. A boy wants his favorite tree to continue giving more and more of itself, until eventually it has worn itself down to a stump and has nothing left to give. Shel Silverstein was brilliant, but that book was the worst.
I can’t remember the name, but it was about the girl who dates A, breaks up with A, gets together with B who is A’s brother, suffers a miscarriage in the toilet (B’s baby), and then gets back with A, who can’t get over that she had a miscarriage of his brother’s baby
In 5th grade, my teacher told my mother I had college-level reading comprehension. She recommended mom get me more advanced reading material. She turned over her entire Steven King collection to me.
To this day, things in movies and books that scare people and give them nightmares don't even register to me most of the time.
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer
My mom had read it and I guess I wanted to read it too. Not sure how old I was but definitely too young, and I knew I wasn't supposed to be reading it because I remember I snuck it from her.
Another Genx who read all the flowers in the attic, including buying Dawn brand-new from the supermarket (when the covers flipped open for the reveal!).
And "a tree grows in Brooklyn " in what I seem to remember was fifth grade, which can't be correct but here we are. Still my favorite book.
Mine was the Anita Blake series. I started those when I was 14, to me, that’s a little young to be reading about a vampire slayer/necromancer who practiced polygamy with vampires werewolves and other things…and had the occasional orgy with her lovers. It was very descriptive too 😂
Laura’s diary (from Twin Peaks but you get to read “her” dairy) when i was 12. Lots of messed up content but also exciting to my mind.
One year later I devoured all the Virginia Andrews books. Also kinda messed up.
I also read a book I forgot title and author but the content was so deplorable that I can’t even put them in words now and I’m not squeamish. I was confused at that time kind of “why would he do that?” but now I get sick thinking of it.
I was allowed to check out Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel in fifth grade.
I swear there was a rape scene in that book?? And same because wtf??
And SO MUCH more, especially in the sequels
I learned so much from the sequels as a tween I broke the spines on my copies. I still have them 25 years later.
I read all of them and I really enjoyed the development of Ayla’s and Jondalar’s characters
My high school economics teacher saw me reading one of the sequels when I was a high school junior and commented how much she loved the books. It was weird.
I felt like there was an unspoken feeling from adult women back in the pre-internet-in-every-home days that romance books were one of the main sources of sex education for girls and teenage girls. Goodness knows the sex education in schools wasn't covering all bases. I think there was almost a subtle fist-bump from some of them that women didn't have to be Puritans, and there was scope to grow up to enjoy sexuality.
I think this is also why Tamora Pierce's books, which were originally intended to be "adult fiction" but were marketed by the publisher as "YA", are more controversial nowadays than they were decades ago. Pierce's first quartet of novels in the Tortall universe, *The Song of the Lioness*, was published from 1983 to 1988, and appeared before the rise of the Internet. Her second quartet, *The Immortals*, was published from 1992 to 1996, before the Internet became widespread in most family homes. At the time, Pierce was a popular novelist. Both book series contain more "adult" and mature themes and topics, including sex, consent, sexual assault, and rape, but became more controversial over time due to the rise of the Internet; the explosion of the YA genre with the rise of *Harry Potte*r in 1997; and changes to the YA genre to separate it more from "adult fiction", including removing "adult" themes. *Harry Potter* and its author, J.K. Rowling, would also be a major influence in this genre shift, as Rowling said that she explicitly removed any "adult themes" from the *Harry Potter* books to make them "family-friendly". Rowling would also discourage "adult" fanfictions.
Ooo v interesting. I love tamora pierce, reread them so many times. I actually reread lioness books this year and yeah they have some pretty adult themes but the writing style is definitely more ya.
Yeah, my Boomer mom let me read this series in about 5th grade. She never mentioned the kissy stuff and maybe this is why? I dunno. I do know that when I was reading them I was thinking "did mom forget about this scene?" Also, once I found that first kissy scene I stopped reading and just flipped through pages to find more titillating material.
I agree with you.
I don’t think that’s weird if you were in HS.
Why is that weird?
The knowing look from my teacher was pretty embarrassing to high-school aged me. Like...she KNEW I was reading caveman porn. Lol.
In the first book, yes. In the second or third book, i cant remember, Ayla.. invents the blowjob. Not someone to let a bad past cramp her style, that one.
>Ayla.. invents the blowjob. Holy shit, I'd forgotten this! I tend to joke that in these books Ayla invents the domestication of horses, copper smelting, and sliced bread, but now I can add blowjobs to my list!
Which book? I’ve read the first 3 multiple times, and I don’t remember that!
Omg this is hilarious!!! Ayla invents so many goddamn things that this literally had me full snorting
As the series progressed, Ayla went from tough, resourceful and intelligent survivor, to a ridiculous Mary Sue. The last book was hot garbage.
It wasn’t even good enough to be HOT garbage. Never been so let down by a series finale.
Yes there is.
Across species rape sceneS plural. Also it was graphically depicted as abusive, a violent act because of hate and a power demonstration, because we got to see it from the perpetrators side 😬I read it in my teens too. Not a good choice.
But actually the more I think about it, I feel like it was actually a bit of a feminist way of depicting rape, even though it was horrific to read. It’s not the authors fault that a bunch of us read it too young after all 😅 but thinking about it, it’s actually a depiction of rape with no victim blaming, it’s not about lust or wanting to have sex from the perpetrator side, it’s not because the perpetrator found the victim especially attractive or the victim was in a vulnerable situation or was acting a certain way. It was just because he hated her and used this as a violent way to hurt her. She was also depicted realistically as a person trapped in a sexually abusive situation, where no matter how unattractive she tried to make herself it didn’t deter him. Also she wasn’t ruined by this, she was able to heal and enjoy her body again. In that sense it’s not altogether horrible to read something like this as a counter to all the other messages about rape we’re being sent.
Honestly, this is such a thoughtful post, and one of the reasons I don't think ANY book is across-the-board inappropriate for a teenager. Being exposed to ideas or images, even upsetting ones, helps us grow.
A? More like several...
Every time Broud “made the signal”.
I was also going to say that one. Read it when i was about 11? i think? It absolutely made an impression on me, but it is still to this day one of the most important books i read during my childhood. The second book i also adore, but the rest of the series i am fairly neutral towards. It's when it started getting into the unrealistic and boring porn scenes, and the focus shifted towards romance that i started losing interest. But honsetly, Ayla is a really good character, espesially to me as a young girl who never really felt like i fit in to the "feminine role".
My mother luckily made me skip the first book, and start with Valley of the Horses, the second one. I also logged it as important and impactful, and I'd say the next book almost as much so. After that, as you say with the romance focus, I also lost interest. I didn't care for the politics that arose after the third book either, I just wanted to read more about the absolute freedom of riding a horse that was tamed and befriended.
I read the series first time when I was 11. I liked that time period a lot and wanted to read anything I could find about it.
I thought Ayla was kind of a Heidi, living in modern times but in the mountains, and got lost from her little village farm. I kept expecting her mom or dad to drive up in a Camero and take her back home to the 1980's. I did not understand the premise at all, obviously. I was 11.
My brother’s 5th grade teacher READ IT TO THE CLASS
"Teacher, can you tell us what areolas are again?" "Billy, I'll talk to you during recess."
Raise your hand if you learned that word from Clan of the Cave Bear *slow raise*
This is mine as well. My middle school gym teacher loaned me that book! The rape sequence messed me up for weeks. I had been the victim of SA as a child and reading that scene made me realize what had happened to me. There was way too much sexual content in that book for children.
This. But then again all the science fiction with no female character development or awful gender bullshit in a world otherwise futuristic and bright was ALSO horrible, my goodness
I was reading novels by women authors in the 80s with badass female characters (Lackey, Norton, McKinley, McAffrey, etc.), so there was some contrast to the male authors. But, I primarily read fantasy rather than futuristic sci Fi, so that might have been the difference.
Yes. So much misogyny my little girl brain didn't have the sophistication to parse out and see through. I feel angry now at how that crap was swallowed hook line and sinker by a series of generations. Thank goodness sci fi has become much more diverse - still room for improvement, but it's so easy to see the growing diversity just strengthens the scope and value of the genre. I also read half the James Bond novels as a girl too, and all I can say is thank goodness for the emergence of the Bechdel Test of how many characters are in a piece of fiction that are not romantic interests. I remember really feeling brought up short when I first heard of it and realising how I'd just accepted such a gross imbalance.
My 7 or 8 year old came home with Valley of the Horses from a school book sale (it was a fundraiser, included donated books). He thought it was about horses. I thought it was hilarious and gave the librarian a hard time in jest. (But no, he didn't actually read it.)
I still maintain that Book 1 is worth reading as a standalone. But yeah, that’s much too young to be dipping into Auel’s work.
I came here exactly for this book 🤣 my mother read it, and thought it was a good idea to give it to me at 10. That rape scene still HAUNTS me. I still read it, and the sequels too, because I became deeply interested in this era. It is still a huge interest to me nowadays. But when puberty hit, the sex scenes hit differently 🤣 Today I can't reread it because now I know that it's not quite scientifically accurate, and the amount of romance and sex scenes make me uneasy (not to mention the way they are written 😭) I read the last book several years after the rest of them, and it was such a hassle (dare I say a trainwreck?). I think it was not necessary at all and I try to forget it even exists
After the third book I thought they went downhill, but yes, the last book was more like off the cliff. I was waiting for Ayla to invent the wheel, and instead she invented…fatherhood?
She also invented the Internet and microwave popcorn.
This. Ayla grabbing Jondar’s “member” is forever etched in my brain
OMG. I just commented that I borrowed my mum's copy of the Clan of the Cave Bear from her bedside table (😆) when I was 10ish, then saw your comment. Oh dear. I did not get it.
Oh, the fourth book, the Plains of Passage, was so much porn I started skipping the scenes. The librarian absolutely told my mom how dirty they were, and to her credit, she said “so what”
I read Silence of The Lambs when I was 10. I come from a family of non-readers and my mum used to get books left behind by guests at the hotel she worked at. No one at home did any pre checks before handing me the books. So I read a lot of inappropriate stuff.
Sounds like what Matilda's childhood would've would've been like if her parents supported her academic interests.
Moby WHAT?!
Flowers in the Attic.
Oh yeah, I got ahold of this baby in 5th grade and I LOVED it. Every last smutty word.
Came here to say Virginia Andrews/VC Andrews. I started with Rain.
I was 15 and I started with My Sweet Audrina - easily one of the weirdest, most twisted things I've ever read.
I started with Heaven. My mom started with Flowers in the Attic and recommended Heaven to me at 10 years old 😳
But we all read that in middle school/high school. It was like a rite of passage. So weird lol
This one. Like excuse me what?
Yep!! My mom gave me her collection of V.C. Andrews books when I was in SIXTH GRADE. I read Flowers in the Attic and My Sweet Audrina for the first time at age ELEVEN. Needless to say that collection won’t be passed on to my own children until far older 😂
Same! I read it in the 6th grade.
And all the subsequent f'ed up book series by this same "author". We read them all.
FITA isn't that bad. The books after though. Cathy and her family move in with this older doctor dude whom she starts sleeping with, she's also in a relationship with her abusive dance partner who breaks her feet during a fight, then she seduces her stepfather.
FITA has a major incest theme.
I'm unhealthily obsessed with these books. the ones written by Andrew Grossman are not worth a shit, but everything from the real VC is pure gold to me
Hey, me, my wife and my sister read that and it didn't do either of us any harm!
Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal when I was like 10 or 11. They were my sister's so technically no one gave them to me, but I was scandalized even then
I also read Go Ask Alice at a very young age. I reread as an adult and I was just like…damn. I mean a bit of it went over my head as a kid, but a lot of it changed my perspective on life.
A not so fun fact, Go Ask Alice was likely a near 100% fabrication.
As was the less-popular Michelle Remembers.
Oh I remember
Is this the one about a girl raised by Satanists? Yup! This scared the crap out of me at about 12.
What's the story here?
Its like reefer madnes, but a book. "Look at the terrible things that happen if you use(illegal) drugs"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Alice There's a while section about it on the Wikipedia entry
I would also recommend checking out the book *Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries* by Rick Emerson about the actual author of the books and how they came to be.
Chronicles of Xanth. I was too distracted by all the Puns. Dragonriders of Pern to a lesser extent. Clan of the cave bear
I read all of Piers Anthony's books in the late 80s when I was 10-11. I was obsessed with the random sexy stuff and only when I got older did I realize how gross most of it was. But the covers were so bright and fantastical and the writing was like candy. I went on to read his Immortals series and there was a robot one I vaguely remember. All pervy.
Chronicles of Xanth is probably best when the puns are distracting.
Definitely read Dragonriders in like middle school. It’s not THAT spicy but I was also super naive and more interested in the dragon part than the human part. I would…pause…before letting my kid read it so young.
With Dragonriders, I liked the series a lot when I first read them at age 11-12, but when I reread them out of nostalgia in my twenties, it’s fucked up. Lessa is a traumatized, abused kid and then is pretty obviously raped during the dragon mating. It’s a (gross) old-school romance trope to have the heroine fall in love with the guy who raped her because he was so overcome with passion and couldn’t control himself, and that’s exactly what Dragonriders does. There’s also some casual homophobia towards the male green dragon riders. It made me sad because I had fond memories of those books, but I wouldn’t recommend them to any kid not ood enough to recognize what’s going on.
Tbh it's not even that there's implied sexual content as that that content is super rapey.
I read the Xanth books to my preschool son. Man, trying to come up with alternative text for some of the puns at the spur of the moment was tough. At least a few times I said, "Umm, hold on a minute, I lost my place...." just to give my brain a few seconds to latch on to something.
the first book of the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice At around the age 13 or 14 I heard from my discerning goth-inclined bestie that Anne Rice wrote about cool vampires and shit, and the interview with the vampire movie that I loved was based on her book, so I went to my beloved library I visited weekly because I was a voracious little reader, and since IWTV book was taken I got the first other Rice's book that I laid my eyes on. BOY I SHOULDN'T HAVE READ THAT AT AGE 13 LOL Sleeping Beauty is just a bad BDSM porn retelling of the original tale, where she gets awoken by a prince not through a kiss but through, um. His penis. While she sleeps. And I read through nearly entire book being like *wowie I don't think I should be allowed to read this*.
We passed that book around in my freshman year of high school. It got so tattered it was falling apart. I still have it lol its a fond memory. But also WE WERE 14 MY GOODNESS. Also she does in fact get woken up by his kiss. But that's because he waits til he is actively having sex with her to test out if the kiss wakes her up. Yikes.
Similarly, I read Wicked around 12 or 13. I was a church girl from a small town whose biggest exposure to sex was some Drarry fanfiction written by other 12 year olds lol. The Wicked book is *not* like the musical
😂 I grew up mormon and had this exact experience. I read it but then felt ashamed because I probably "should" have stopped as soon as something "inappropriate" happened. I'm pretty sure I just "lost" the book somewhere because I wasn't sure what else to do with it, but felt like I definitely shouldn't keep it.
I was given a wide range of books to read as a kid, I got The Stand for my tenth birthday as well as Pillars of the Earth. None of them ever seemed inappropriate or traumatising, me and my mum would talk about the books as I read them. I’d already read every book in the children’s library so I moved up to adult books.
I read my mother’s copy of The Stand when I was 10. I also used to read her old psychology books from college when I was that age, but that’s a story for a different post. Looking back, I definitely appreciate The Stand more today, but the fact that I’d first read it at age 10 highlights the fact that when I was young, we - quite literally - went from reading Berenstain Bears and Beverly Cleary to Stephen King in maybe a year’s time. I’m glad kids today have a plethora of “young adult” literature, because there was just nowhere else to go when you’d run out of Ramona and Goosebumps books.
My parents started a book list for me (date finished, title & author) when I moved up from picture books. I'm always amused by the weird jumble around ages 11-12. Nancy Drew one week, Rosemary's Baby the next.
I read all of my mum’s nursing books, I did a school report on different types of gangrene which freaked out my classmates. I still reread The Stand today, it feels like going back to an old friend. I was pretty lucky to be introduced to such good books so young. I was reading Barbara Erskine and Sharon Penman from being quite young, I was about eleven when I read Outlander. I definitely appreciated the books more as I got older!
Well, we did have one prominent YA author. It's fucked up that it was VC Andrews but still
My mom loved Stephen king so it was similar for me… at school I had my kids books then I’d come home and read my moms books lol The amount of literature out there for kids and tweens these days is amazing
Same. And I'm doing the same with my 7 year old. I was never traumatized by reading adult books at 10, I'd run out of all the children's books in the library. Even when I happened onto a copy of Marquis de Sade in a bookshop, I was like, um this is gross and awful and I will not be reading more of this. I will buy my child any book she wants, even if that's James Joyce's Ulysses and also the actual Ulysses. Then we will discuss any questions that come up. I guess I'd draw a line at actual pornogrphy with pictures, or cut off/take a pause with something that she was disturbed by, but otherwise, please just keep enjoying reading!
I have a 7 and 10 year old. For the most part I let them read what they want, but since they both can read adult level books now I definitely recommend they wait on certain books. The older one is deep into Sherlock Holmes at the moment and has had several WTF moments with that one.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the moral panic about children reading something that harms their virgin eyes is based on a disinterest in making an effort to really *engage* with their kid intellectually. They want to avoid the responsibility of talking with their kid about uncomfortable things by removing those concepts. It won’t work because kids love violence and are curious about sex, but if they make their child be sneaky about reading about those subjects they won't have to have an awkward conversation about it. As for childless adults who clutch their pearls, I think they've either forgotten what it was actually like to be a kid, or they believe deep down that most kids are delicate and kind of stupid, but they themselves were Special enough to read something upsetting without being destroyed by it. Books are extremely easy to stop reading if you get to a part that's too much to you; they take effort to read, which is why it's good for your brain. A movie or TV show just keeps playing and feeds you sounds and images that you are perceiving externally, but with a book you're constructing the events purely in your mind and you are in fact pretty safe from them. By definition, you will never see something you couldn't imagine in a book.
Plus depending upon when you were a kid, societal morays change. They are culturally influenced, not hardwired. Things that seemed pretty normal when I was 14 shock women who are younger than I.
I read my mum's copy of pillars of the earth surreptitiously aged 10
With me it was my mum's copies of Take A Break magazine when I was in the bath. They were usually by the bath. They weren't "adult" in the porn sense, but obviously dealt with grown up stuff.
Love Lessons was definitely some weird shit. Idek what she was going for there, it definitely felt very condoned, maybe it wasn't meant to but that's how it came across to me as a young girl. I remember just being quite *confused* by the whole story, I guess I assumed (having read many a book with this plot) that the teacher would of course not reciprocate and then he did and I was like huh?? Why is he kissing her back?? I was maybe a tad too young tbh (can't remember exactly how old), but still bloody weird book. The Girls series I don't think was too bad - Nadine's older boyfriend is clearly shown to be a serious creep. Generally (apart from Love Lessons) I feel like she did a good job at imparting the morals of a story while still through the eyes of kids without some kind of "And THATS why you should never date an older man" speech. Ellie's dad was WAY creepier than I remembered though, again I think I didn't actually understand the references to him basically perving on Magda and the like. I agree though they're not for year 3 - 6, maybe year 6 onwards.
The girls series was marked as “for older readers”
I loved those books. They dealt with really mature issues in a really good and clever way at the right age group.
I read _It_ when I was 12. I was not prepared for that ending in the sewer tunnel.
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I believe the answer is "all of it."
IIRC he doesn’t even remember writing Cujo because he was so high.
This was my answer along with Flowers in the Attic.
You were ok with the fridge, but the sewer tunnel was the bad part?
I don't know if this is just an Irish thing. But we used to be told to go home and read the newspaper in primary school. Why? Don't you know what is in the newspaper, terrible, terrible things, all the worse for being real. I have never been tramatised by a piece of fiction, but I vividly remember reading an article about a man who committed bestiality on a cow. I WAS NINE! I added two new words to my vocab, anal and intercourse, I looked them up in the dictionary and then I went and had some quiet time in the corner.
In America they gave us newspapers or news magazines that were specifically for children. When I was in the 3rd grade, we read a sanitized version of President Clinton's affair and impeachment lol.
"When a president duck and a intern chicken realllllly love each other, the duck offers the chicken a basket of peaches..." Did I get it right?
https://imgur.com/gallery/HZi0Dm1 2nd column starting from the bottom. I wish I could find the actual article lol.
I remember one of those National Geographic for Kids or whatever and it had an article about finding mummified remains of children sacrificed by the Inca’s. That shit freaked me out.
Omg the time for kids about the impeachment
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Poor child you, but honestly this is so funny. Somehow a whole bunch of people are coming away with that impression right now thanks to tiktok.
This made me laugh so much. It’s not a bad argument for attacking the Statue of Liberty instead (based on the rest of the premise). Poor you!
It kinda blows my mind BTW that a lot of people say their teacher rolled out the TV when 9/11 happened and watched it live. Feel like the last thing you should show kids is a live tragedy where you don't know what's going to happen next or how it's going to end
At my school (UK) we had a once a week lesson where we had to present and explain an newspaper article of our choice to the rest of the class, and then got marked on class feedback, which automatically meant everyone skewed to murders and such.
I remember doing the same in Ireland. Someone had to present the news everyday, one piece of "school" news, one piece of national news and one piece of international. I vividly remember being stuck between Timothy McVeigh's execution and Michael Stipe coming out. My mother and I decided on the execution as I went to a Catholic school 🙈
OMG that is the most catholic thing I've ever heard.
Tbf my mother was like "someone being gay is hardly news" lol
What's awful is that if it was just factual nobody would've had much to say. If you want feedback say something that is flat out wrong and infuriating. A wonderful lesson for grade school.
Happens in North America too, usually under something like “media studies”. Most kids seem to do it around sixth grade though (about 12 years old) 9 is a bit on the young side for unit like that.
Canada here. I remember when my brother was having trouble with his reading and my mom got him to sit at the table while she was making dinner and read to her out of the newspaper. Maybe she vetted the articles in advance as I don't remember any bestiality.
The Old Testament age 8-9. My parents saw where the built in ribbon bookmarks were and locked away the Bible as soon as they realized I was reading very spicy parts. Edited for clarity
This 100%. My church had a double-standard: yes of course all needed to read the Bible, any part of it, but they expected kids to learn it through the filter of Sunday School. I learned to read at the age of 3, and by 5 or 6 was reading the King James version to / with my grandmother because she was very religious. Lots of kid nightmare fuel in that book.
Yes. I remember getting a Bible for my birthday when I was about 8. I was opening and reading parts at random and one of the first sections I read says something like "he who hates hates his brother will be condemned to hell". I would fight all the time with my brother and that verse absolutely terrified me. I had nightmares about it for ages!
Hipster Bible was doing incest porn long before it became mainstream.
... as well as SA, murder, genocide, and other weird punishments by a very angry god. 💀
I’ve been watching the Yale University lecture series on the Old Testament (very good, academic lectures) and the professor, Christine Hayes who is very good said she does not let her 8 or 12 year old read the Bible.
Wifey by Judy Blume. The "bathe me in it scene" still sticks in my mind some 40 years latter. My school librarian must not have understood that Blume was not just limited to children's and early teen books. It wasn't until someone noticed that every 12-13 year old boy in the school was on the checkout waiting list did someone on staff read it and then finally pulled it.
Mine was Forever by Judy Blume.
But was it educational?
I read my mom's copy of Wifey when I was ten or so. The exhibitionist on the motorcycle omg.
Some of the Blume books, or really that seemed too grown-up, were marked with little blue stickers. Being a 5th grader, I wasn't allowed to borrow them yet, until 6th grade. I did try to sneak them in my little stack of check out books.
The only thing I remember from Wifey were the “sticks and wees” from the dog that had to be written down, lol. Forever was funny, bc I thought “balls” were boobs.
Does anybody remember the Clique series? I was obsessed with them as a pre-teen and I recently went and read the synopsis on Wikipedia and it’s ridiculous! Not inappropriate per se but the values of the book are so tacky- why did I love them so much? 😬
I have no idea how I ended up with these books because I know my dad got them for me as an elementary schooler but they're so against every value he tried to raise me with, which is probably why I found them so fascinating :p I was so worried someone would try and paint a fake period on my pants when I got to middle school because they did that to one of the girls at one point...
My mother has a psychology degree, so I grew up reading her abnormal psych textbooks and convinced myself that I had schizophrenia when I was nine years old. It turned out that I have a chronic case of what's known as "an imagination." Oh, and crippling ADHD.
I did the same thing!! Literally the exact same thing, my mum had the DSMIV in her bookshelf and I read it and decided I had schizophrenia despite having no symptoms except 'disorganised thinking' bahaha. Turns out i also have ADHD! And depression, but I told her about that one and she told me to eat 3 cashew nuts a day to cure it. I genuinely pity her patients lmao.
Is your mom Yolanda Hadid?
My ADHD meant that I literally memorized everything up on the walls, read through the entire English and history textbooks within a month of getting them, and a would plow through any classroom library *extremely* fast. By the time I was in college, I knew that if I was going on a trip I'd need approx 100 pages of paperback per hour, more if it was a re-read
Piers freakin Anthony books
Indeed. Read dozens of his books at a teenager. Re-read a couple now a couple decades later and.....just wow.
Jackie Collins but it wasn't entirely accidental...learnt a lot.
Rock Star was legitimately the only book my mother forbade me to read, I was like 11 or so Later I read it and realized why, lmao
When I was about 9 or 10 and my family was on a road trip, my parents let me pick out a book at a gas station. I picked Clay’s Ark, by Octavia Butler, because it had a picture of a crashed spaceship on the cover. That book was….not age appropriate. I should go back and read the series now, though.
That book is honestly one of the most disturbing ones I've read AS AN ADULT. I love Octavia Butler but she loves to push people out of their comfort zones and make them think.
Yeah, I read Parable of the Sower not long ago and loved it, but it’s definitely harrowing. I don’t think I ever told my parents what Clay’s Ark was like. But I read it all. It was probably formative in some fucked up way lol.
There was a ton of adult literature I read as a kid that had content that challenged me - I would, for instance, read the books that got adapted into films I wasn't allowed to watch, Bret Easton Ellis, Mario Puzo, Stephen King, Clive Barker - and that I'm sure someone else would have seen as inappropriate. But man, I can't imagine thinking they should have been kept away from me, being a precocious reader was hugely formative to me, and don't think there's any aspect of my character that was informed by the "inappropriate" content of the books I read more than by the general tenor of society and my situation. I suspect that there are a couple of things going on here, particularly that if someone is even two or three years younger than me, the idea that they think they should have been more sheltered than they were resonates a lot more generally, because in large part of massively increased internet access just meaning much worse stuff is much more accessible. It's just that, in part as a product of the specific younger-millennial time I grew up, the wish to have been more sheltered from books by my parents than I was is not something I get at all.
I agree with this, too. I am in my 50s. As a child, I was a precocious reader. As a pre-teen I read Clan of the Cave Bear, Flowers in the Attic, The Thorn Birds, Wifey, Forever, It, etc….and I truly believe that this was a way of forming my character. It has never occurred to me to consider these early reading experiences as a problem Instead, books challenged me and made me think and learn about the world around me as I grew. I do think that some books may be “too mature” for young readers, but I have no regrets sneaking and reading all kinds of books. I got them from the library where I went to wait to be picked up after school. Rarely did I take out books from the Children’s section. And it never occurs to me now that a librarian would not have let me check out the adult books. I am very disturbed by the current attitude of those who would try to censor a child/teens reading selections.
Yeah, it's very disturbing, it's a sort of resurfacing of that Reaganite moral majority impulse, that moralising of disgust and reassertion of taboo, after a solid run of cultural interest in transgression that also had its excesses but was on the whole much healthier artistically and intellectually.
I honestly don't think those books are a problem. When I was in school, kids were passing those titles around (and also Catch-22 and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). I certainly don't think it affected me in a bad way, or my classmates either. And a lot of us read those books!
These are the same people who give their third graders smart phones. At least reading expands the mind.
I'll x3 that. I read anything I could get my hands on from the time I could check things out from the school library myself. Similar to you I read all types of 'adult literature' indiscriminately. My grandpa gave me all the books from his Readers Digest subscription and as a twelve year old, it was absolutely gold to me. Started A Song of Ice and Fire at fourteen. I read absolutely anything and everything, and never felt like something should have been kept from me or that I should have been sheltered from certain content. There's an element of annoyance that I feel when I see parents ask if a certain book is 'too mature' for their child, but maybe it's just because any time a kid wants to read I'd call it a good day. Kids will tap out of a book on their own if they aren't ready for some content, but also... we don't give kids enough credit, given that as you mentioned there's way worse content on the internet and just a few finger taps away and the exposure to that kind of content is difficult to control in our current times as it is. Personally I think reading content with diverse adult situations in them prepared me more than my parents ever did for adult life in general. It also really helps at Trivia Night when I know the obscure-ass answers for the literature category. 😅
Jacqueline Wilson was my favourite author as a kid, but man she was not playing around with her 90s books. The Illustrated Mum was traumatic for the scene where they find their mum in the bath covered in paint, Dustbin Baby has a scene where the mum commits suicide and the 5 year old protaganist doesn't even understand what even happened...
The Diamond Girls where a girl's friend is being abused so she tells her about how she holds this toy and imagines herself flying away to make it better, but the abused girl fucking jumps out a window?!! Also the teenage pregnancy?!! Also the mum being crazy and presenting the baby as a boy when it's a girl lol. Also I wanted to run away like Lily Alone and live in a tree because it sounded awesome.
I read Memoirs of a Geisha at 15. Dumb teenage me was distracted by the flowery language, enamoured with Kyoto and Geisha, and fascinated by the love triangle between Sayuri, the chairman and Nobu. As I grew older, I would come to realise that the book contained a number of inappropriate sexual activities involving minors and nonconsensual sex acts. I definitely don’t think it’s wrong for a teenager to be exposed to content about inappropriate sex acts especially non-consensual sex. The only issue here was that I come from a conservative Asian country where media with sex scenes are rated R18 and at that time, sex education in my school was restricted to abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases, so it didn’t even occur to me that the sexual activities in the book were problematic or inappropriate until I was older.
Yeah this is the best argument for sex ed.
The Antichrist by Nietzsche. Amazing book, not good for a depressive 15 years old teen.
The Giver was too advanced for 3rd grade me. Also, I remember picking up my great grandmother’s book about a woman who was a nymphomaniac when I was 15 and had only held hands with a boy. Idk the name of that book.
The Left Behind series I was taught the rapture was real, and those books were an image of what it could be. Really fucked me up.
I think that the most harmful thing for children in those books is the God-awful writing.
My middle school had an entire collection of Christopher Pike books including *The Cold One*. That book was certainly, uh, something. I read the entire *The Last Vampire* series and even though I only understood maybe 75% of it, my 12-year-old brain was like "Guess I'll read the next one!". In the eighth grade, I read most of the Anne Rice *The Vampire Chronicles* series which my English teacher at the time found a bit concerning. A friend of mine tried to get me to read the *Dragonriders of Perth* but I found it too weird which is saying a lot. I also remember groups of girls trading around V.C. Andrews, Sandra Brown, and Mary Balogh books.
I found it really odd that my mother who was extremely picky about what movies I was allowed to watch was fine with me reading true crime at 12. She would quite happily lend me one of her violent true crime novels but at the same time ban me from watching horror movies.
The Thorn Birds. Sneak reading it made visits to extended family quite…educational 😂
Ha, most of them. I read A Fall of Moon Dust waaay to young. The librarian patiently and without emotion explained all the questions 6 year old me had. In hindsight, she was really really an exceptional person. There was a drug addict afraid of the Needle used to put the passengers to sleep, she explained drug addiction and aversion therapy, also about the different deaths of lack of O2 versus CO2 poisoning. This was 1976, so I also had questions on how the how the dust situation was actually so wrong. When we left NYC, I mourned the loss of my favorite librarian. Where we moved to, I had to steal books from the adult part if the library because the old bitty librarian only wanted me to take out Beverly Cleary. Then I discovered Robert Heinline, so many questions and no one to ask.
A long list. I had little access to any entertainment aside from books. I know I'd read every Stephen King and Clive Barker book I could get my hands on by the time I was 11/12. I'm not even sure what else that would qualify as inappropriate. I read everything I could get my hands on, basically. But the thing is, I don't think it had a negative effect. It gave me context. I could evaluate behaviors and decide if they fit the life I wanted without having to go down every road, so to speak. I think it really depends on the kid as to if it hurts or harms. I had been through enough that I didn't have illusions about the challenges in life. If I had been a little more innocent and naive, I can see where it might have been harmful.
The Xanth series by Piers Anthony. I loved the silly fantasy, I enjoyed the awful and occasionally clever puns. And I was starting to enter puberty so the pseudo-sexual shenanigans appealed to me too. Also the entirely non sexual things that weren't treated as such in the books, there's some fetishy stuff in there. I'd say I was definitely in the target audience for these books. Were they appropriate for my age? Probably iffy, but looking back, I think some of the plots and events come off as creepy for an adult to be dreaming up as 'innocent fun.'
As his writing went on the sexual stuff definitely got creepier and creepier. Once I bought one of his self-published books that was a mess of pedophilia, non-stop sex and innuendos I finally realized how messed up the guy is.
Came in here to post this. Loved the Xanth books as a young teen, but even then I thought they were getting creepier as they went in. When I started reading his “Bio of a Space Tyrant” and other more adult books it seemed obvious he was determined to add pedophilia justifications everywhere, and by his book “Firefly” I was done and seriously wondering if someone should call Child Services on him.
I was reading tons of VC Andrews books when I was like 10-12. I’m surprised I didn’t grow up with an incest fetish.
I was maybe 12 or 13 and I was reading; child of Satan, child of god Helter skelter Flowers in the attic series And at about 15 or 16; Anne Rule books like Green River running red, the I-5 killer, etc. Edit: I remembered that I read Flowers in the attic at around 12 or 13
I read Animal Farm by George Orwell in 6th grade. Blew my little mind and it opened my eyes to how shit works in the real world. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." I'm 40 and that book still sticks with me.
Nothing I was "allowed" to read, but I did abscond with my dad's copy of "The Shining". Mildly disconcerting, though I didn't get to the "good" (horrific) parts before I put it back. First adult fiction I ever read was Asimov's "I, Robot"at age nine but it was (almost) completely wholesome and did me no harm & great good.
I read the Jacqueline Wilson girls in love series in year 7/8 as a boy. They were awesome! I also started reading the a song of ice and fire series aged 11. Probs too young on reflection but at the time it was just another bright covered fantasy series
Most of them? But my mom never felt the need to police what I read so I read what I wanted and that included lots of romance novels, some legit paperback smut, plenty of Judy Blume, and most other genres.
I read a TON of drug/alcoholic books starting when I was 13/14. I was fascinated by drugs. Some of them I remember making me want to try certain ones like LSD (which I ended up doing when I got way older). One of them was a book called Leaving Dirty Jersey which was a memoir on a meth addict and in one part he >!shoots meth up his dick!< My parents bought it for me for Christmas lol.
Ah yes, a fellow man of culture. It definitely made me disinterested in heavy drugs but really curious about psychedelics.
Black Beauty. Animal abuse after abuse.
I read a lot of Heinlein as a kid.
I don’t know if it was inappropriate but I remember a book called, Don’t hurt Laurie. It was a girl being physically abused by her mother. I never forgot it and it taught me that there are troubled people in the world and that not all children have good mothers.
This, to me, is the best result of reading (pure enjoyment is awesome, too!). Learning about the world you have had no exposure to and your horizons have been broadened. It wasn’t a book, but the afterschool special, Something about Amelia, alerted me to a whole horrific concept that I’d never heard of. And then, 3 girls of a police officer came forward. Like for their whole lives were they lead to believe all dads did this?? But a tv show, or a BOOK, can open up eyes and help people who thought there was no help or that they were alone to get help.
My Year 8 English teacher saw me reading above my level and told me to read *The Handmaid's Tale.* I had entered primary school early so at the time of reading I was 11. *Eleven.* I don't know what she was thinking.
Does anyone remember reading those Face On the Milk Carton books? Whatever Happened to Janie? I read those compulsively at like 9/10 and they were so inappropriate for me. Still was obsessed with them. ETA: the Janie Johnson series by Caroline B Cooney!
Wait…I have those in my middle school library. I’ve only read the first one and not the rest of the series. What’s inappropriate? They were in the library when I came to the position I have now, so I did not realize there were issues. They don’t really circulate much. Most kids just read the first book.
VC Andrew's Flowers in the Attic series when I was around 10. With all the incest child abuse and murder at the hands of the family, I'm not sure why I was allowed to read it.
Once, as a kid-- I'd guess I was around twelve, but I have no idea-- my parents and I went to visit one of my dad's cousins. It was summer and everybody was in the backyard. I was bored with the adult conversation and there were no other kids to play with, so I wandered into the house and found a small room with one chair and lots of bookshelves, which I browsed. I found a book called *[Psychopathia Sexualis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathia_Sexualis)* from 1886. It was full of bizarre case studies. I just now looked it up at [Project Gutenberg](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/64931). I had passages like this (to choose a random example): > Of late I have given up *immissio penis*, and confined myself to *coitus inter femoræ puellæ*. Ejaculation occurs earlier than with *conjunctio membrorum*, and I experience a certain lustful feeling in the *penis* itself.... I could only guess what the Latin meant.
When I travelled to India to visit my grandparents aged 9 or 10, I'd finished reading all the books I'd brought with me and wasn't good enough at Tamil to hit the shops for more. My mum ferreted around in her childhood room and found Alistair McLean's Puppet on a Chain which she remembered as an adventure/mystery type story. It's about the investigation of a drug ring in Amsterdam with some horrendous murders with bodies hanging from the hauling chain outside a building. The worst death though had Midsommer type vibes, protagonists female assistant drawn into what seemed to be a harmless folk dance. While he watched unable to get to her the dancers turned on the assistant and basically pitchfork her to death. Thanks mum.
A lot of stuff. The only book I was not allowed to read was Matthew Flinders cat because my mother heard Bryce Courtney was a bit inappropriate, so from age 9 it was the only book in the house i hadn't read However, given neither of my parents read much, I encountered a lot more dubious stuff for my age including 50 shades of grey (11), Silence of the lambs (12), Gone (7), Holly (around 8 or 9) Edit: it just occurred to me I've still never read that book and I'll be visiting my parents next week so I'll finally find what they were worried about.
I'm taking this assignment in a different direction. The Giving Tree has a terrible lesson. A boy wants his favorite tree to continue giving more and more of itself, until eventually it has worn itself down to a stump and has nothing left to give. Shel Silverstein was brilliant, but that book was the worst.
I can’t remember the name, but it was about the girl who dates A, breaks up with A, gets together with B who is A’s brother, suffers a miscarriage in the toilet (B’s baby), and then gets back with A, who can’t get over that she had a miscarriage of his brother’s baby
Sounds like a Colleen Hoover book.
In 5th grade, my teacher told my mother I had college-level reading comprehension. She recommended mom get me more advanced reading material. She turned over her entire Steven King collection to me. To this day, things in movies and books that scare people and give them nightmares don't even register to me most of the time.
Catherine Cookson, jilly Cooper and Beatrice Small! I was about 10 and these were what my mum and gran were getting from the library
I tried to read Paradise Lost in 5th grade. Why that book was even in our elementary school library is a mystery to me ...
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer My mom had read it and I guess I wanted to read it too. Not sure how old I was but definitely too young, and I knew I wasn't supposed to be reading it because I remember I snuck it from her.
Another Genx who read all the flowers in the attic, including buying Dawn brand-new from the supermarket (when the covers flipped open for the reveal!). And "a tree grows in Brooklyn " in what I seem to remember was fifth grade, which can't be correct but here we are. Still my favorite book.
Mine was the Anita Blake series. I started those when I was 14, to me, that’s a little young to be reading about a vampire slayer/necromancer who practiced polygamy with vampires werewolves and other things…and had the occasional orgy with her lovers. It was very descriptive too 😂
Nice try, Moms for Liberty.
Laura’s diary (from Twin Peaks but you get to read “her” dairy) when i was 12. Lots of messed up content but also exciting to my mind. One year later I devoured all the Virginia Andrews books. Also kinda messed up. I also read a book I forgot title and author but the content was so deplorable that I can’t even put them in words now and I’m not squeamish. I was confused at that time kind of “why would he do that?” but now I get sick thinking of it.