This is inspired by a post on the thread about books that took you several tries. What books did you read too early? Did they mess you up or just go over your head?

I can't think of any that went over my head -- because, you know, they went over my head -- but I can think of two that messed me up. One was The Diary of Anne Frank, which my third grade teacher gave me to read. Since I skipped a grade, I was only seven when I read that, and she had to give me all the backstory about the Holocaust. I don't necessarily believe in lying to kids about history, but I was too young for that. I had a lot of nightmares back then, and I think the Holocaust stories had something to do with that.

The other was The Godfather, which I read when I was about 12. I got it from my grandmother, who had it on her shelf but probably hadn't read it. I borrowed it from her while I was visiting on vacation, and I read it on the plane. My dad was a little horrified when I got home.

That book didn't mess me up because of the violence, though. It was Sonny's mistress -- you know the one -- and her anatomical oddity. I became totally obsessed with that for a while; I was sure I was going to have the same thing. The Godfather probably saved me from teenage pregnancy or something, but honestly, like teenage girls need something else to be insecure about.

Oh, yes, one more: Flowers in the Attic. We all read that in seventh grade, right? I would have been eleven. Is that really how little girls need to learn about sex? Incestuous rape? Yick.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Answers

The Exorcist, when I was in 6th grade - it was the crucifix scene. I 'got' it, but...ow.

Worse though, in terms of making me have to muddle over things I wasn't really ready to comprehend, was a collection of Psychology Today magazines my dad had, when I was 6 or so. In the late 60s, they were doing big juicy questionnaires that made me ask all sorts of questions my parents weren't ready to give me answers to. I remember them sitting me down to have a Talk over my obsession with an issue on Death (I still remember the cover was this beautiful green grassy field with a gaping open grave) and whether I had any questions I wanted to ask. I had lots but the magazine raised a lot of complex questions I wouldn't have thought to be concerned by otherwise.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I'd have to agree on Flowers in the Attic - it is indeed a very bad introduction to sex, especially when you're ten years old and don't even realize that it IS rape.

I was too young when I read Hollywood Wives as well as Judy Blume's adult-oriented Wifey. I forget if I was 12 or 13, but either way, both those books went WAY over my head at the time.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

The Sensuous M when I was 10. Front to back, and then again. But if you added the age of the girl I was reading it with (it was her parent's book), we were 21.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

My father had a book called Infamous Murders which he put in the family bookcase. Lots of pictures. Lots and lots. Had nightmares for years.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I read every "adult" book I could get my hands on - I so desperately wanted to be older and sophisticated - and regret the things I learned about sex from some of them. I read all the James Bond books and believed every word, that it was important to be sensouous and please my man and so on. I wish I'd somehow been encouraged to figure out what I wanted, instead.

We were just talking about what age is appropriate for telling children about the Holocaust. I certainly know people who were traumatized in a way they might not have been if they were older. Maybe not, though.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I read just about everything V.C. Andrews wrote when I was in junior high, as well as a lot of Robert Heinlein from his later, dirty-ol'- bastard period. And, Lord help me, every piece of poo that Piers Anthony could crank out. Anyone else remember the Bio of a Space Tyrant series?

I was probably too young for most of these books, especially as they were my main source of information on sex. (I remember wishing that a family of incestuous redheads would swoop down in their time machine and carry me off, just like in Heinlein's books, and they'd adopt me and we'd have orgies and live forever!) But in retrospect, I don't think they did too much damage. And at least they were creative and mind-expanding, as opposed to the crushingly conformist, Sweet-Valley- High-type pablum that's marketed to girls that age.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up reading Sidney Sheldon. I read piles of my mom's romance novels whilst grounded in early elementary school. Sex=rape. I also read one of my father's mysteries wherein Hitler is still alive and they are hot on his trail. When I learned later about the Holocaust, I wondered why they didn't mention that Hitler is still out there. Freaked me out for years. Black Beauty was the first novel I read, and it is way more graphic than most people think. Also, The Book of Lists at age 5. See pages describing torture methods by country (rape by trained dogs??) and bizarre deaths. I can't really recommend My Secret Garden before the age of 8, either.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I always hated "The Little Prince", until I read it as a grown-up. That belongs to a strange category of books for adults that masquerade as books for children.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

"...drove into my tight and resisting flesh which tore and bled." I memorized V.C. Andrews, was way too young, of course, and while I knew what went where when I read that, I had no idea about hymens (Greek mythology was a concurrent phase but apparently I didn't make the connection) and wondered where the hell he was putting himself that she tore and bled. Her navel? Actually I'm really glad I didn't know about hymens and instead thought that Christopher had some bellybutton fetish, because if I had had that as my introduction to What Happens Your First Time, I might never have had sex.

It strikes me now that all of my earliest reading about sex was unhealthy--Christopher, Paul, Julian, and Bart in V.C. Andrews (I only read the Flowers ones); Broud in Clan of the Cave Bear; Leo, Francisco, Hank, John, and especially Howard in Ayn Rand. And The Happy Hooker. I was *definitely* too young for that.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Since someone e-mailed and asked: the anatomical oddity in The Godfather was that she was (how did they put it?) too big. In her vaginal area. So she could only have sex with a guy who had a giant cock, like Sonny. Then he died and she thought her life was over, until she met a handsome young plastic surgeon who fixed her up and they lived happily ever after.

I'll see your Sidney Sheldon and raise you a Harold Robbins. I'm positive I wasn't actually supposed to be reading that. Also: that book my friend Keri loaned me that had the woman having sex with the champion German shepherd. Also: Lady Chatterly's Lover, because it can leave a young girl with the mistaken impression that sex is very boring indeed. Also: The Red Badge of Courage in sixth grade, because damn, way to make a kid hate reading.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Harold Robbins. You can't check anything by him out of the Monmouth County Library if you're 9. Just in case you needed to know.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Different Seasons, a book of short stories by Stephen King. It had "The Body", which the film Stand By Me was based on, as well as the story The Shawshank Redemption was based on, and finally, "Apt Pupil", also made into a movie recently. Apt Pupil was a horrible thing for me to read at age 11, all about a Nazi hiding in the US after the war who trapped cats and killed them in his oven.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Oh, I forgot about The Ninja by *snort* Eric van Lustbader! I read it in 15-minute segments sneaked in the library during study hall. Yakuza orgies! Hot-tubbing lesbians who use six-shooters as vibrators! And something about some international conspiracy, but really, who gives a crap about that.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

The Happy Hooker at 12 or so . . . .only thing I remember now was something about ejaculate distance. It was stuck in a bargin book bag of Harlequin/Mills&Boone (40 or so books for $3). Not sure if someone was trying to be subversive about that. I do think the Harlequins warped my mind more than Ms Hollander did.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

My sister is 7 years older than I am, so I had access to a lot of "older than my age" books. The first one I remember truly messing with my head was "The Insulted and The Humiliated" by Dostoyevksy. My sister was reading for it her English baccalaureate exam in high school (similar to British A-levels)--I was about 11 at the time. I picked it up and was swept away by the bleak, depressing life of one of the characters, Nellie, who is 13 years old. The story--which is probably one of Dostoyevsky's weakest--just blew my mind. I think I was moping around in corners for a few days after I finished it.

Later on the same year, I 'secretly' got a hold of "How to save your life" by Erica Jong. Not only was it my first introduction to graphic love scenes, it was my first introduction to anything homosexual (i.e lesbian). Talk about eye-opener...

My parents never, ever monitored what I was reading. My sister did, once in a while,but then she'd turn around and give me something off her bookshelf. Maybe that's why I am so fascinated by children and YA books now--I am regressing to the childhood reading I should have done.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I went through a period when I was in fifth and/or sixth grade during which I read not only the V.C. Andrews books, but everything by Jackie Collins I could get my hands on. I remember a certain scene in one of her books (Hollywood Wives?) where a couple were stuck together after sex and remained that way for what seemed to be an extended period of time. This worried me for some time. I was obviously curious about sex at the time and it's so sad that I got my information from trash novels. I also misconstrued the Christopher/Christina (was that the ballerina's name?) rape scene, as well as many others, I'm sure. That's disturbing.

I also read many violent thrillers and horrors novels at a young age-- mostly my older sister's Stephen King and Clive Barker books. I don't remember any of those scaring me terribly much, although the movie version of Carrie, which I saw around the same time, gives me the shivers to this day.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Catherine. The ballerina was Catherine. Who were the twins? Cory and Corina? I can't remember.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

First: I had no idea a vagina could actually be too big.

Second: Had it not been for these books, I may never have learned ANYTHING about sex. My mother wouldn't let us use the word "bra", for cry-eye.

Third: Thanks to Mommy Dearest, my mother endured years of Teen Rebellion Hell with that name, and "Joanie".

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Another Bad Girl, I'm not sure a vagina can be too big. I think Mario Puzo set out deliberately to mess up some young girls. There's also some child molestation in that book, but that went totally over my head until I read it again later.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Beth, the twins were Cory and Carrie.

I think vaginas can get a little ... roomy ... if one has had many, many children and not done enough Kegel exercises. But I have no idea where I picked up this tidbit of info, so I may be full of it.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Prepare for squickage: I had a roommate (a total bitch, so this is fitting) who was too loose. I know several people who fucked her, due to her charming habit of fucking my friends and then fighting over who they *could* hang out with. One friend ACCIDENTLY fisted her. Another confessed after she left that he thought he was just between her thighs and not in her because it was like there were "no walls." Ick. Ick. Anyway, it apparently happens.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

The big vagina thing sounds like a myth the woman would make up, esp if she was afraid her husband my kill her if he suspected her of adultery. "Why NOOO, honeypookie, I could never be satisfied by anyone but you, because you're SOOOOO big, and my big old vagina couldn't even feel a normal sized penis!"

That way he can feel secure AND swagger around thinking he's exeptionally large, and no one has to die. I wonder if Puzo thought it was true, though?

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

accidentally...

er.

That's the last time I respond to a post without reading allll the way to the end of the thread.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

You guys are scaring me. I'm going to call Jeremy right now and check.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Whew. He swears I'm normal.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Now that was TMI.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

(Psst. I didn't really call him. I was just kidding.)

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Books I read way too early: From my brother's secret book stash in the closet: Candy, Fanny Hill, Diary of a Flea, and other such things. I guess I was about eight when I found them. Gave me totally screwed up ideas about sex. From my Dad's bookshelf: Summerhill, about the permissive school. It had a chapter titled "Masturbation". I was allowed to read the book openly until one day I asked "Dad, what is this word?" After that I had to sneak it out from where he thought I couldn't reach behind his old college Psychology text books. The worst part, really, was that I got into arguments with my elementary school teachers over their teaching methods after reading it and was grounded for being "smartmouth".

About the wide vagina thing? A woman who was in my ex-husband's grad school department had a "party trick" in which she made a big industrial flashlight disappear. Yeech.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Lynda--see, my spelling fails in the face of such nastiness. And Beth, hon, I think you would know.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Yeah, but not when you were twelve.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

John Saul books. Anybody read these gems? Trashy, gory horror that grossed me out (and that would have been the exact term I'd have used back then) and gave me nightmares but I kept reading them.

And I was in exactly seventh grade when I read Flowers in the Attic. The first girl to bring it to school and read it (at our very Catholic nun-filled Jr. high school) ended up getting pregnant in eighth grade at fourteen. Major. Scandal. I used to wonder if the two facts were related...

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

ack... I didn't notice the spelling, I was just gaping at the idea. ok, not GAPING gaping, but...nevermind.

flashlights?

I'm not old enough for this thread.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I think we should ban the word "gaping" for the remainder of this discussion.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Gaping. Funny word.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Alisha Klass!"

Anyway....

How 'bout books that you read to late? I didn't read "Catcher in the Rye" until I was well out of college, married for several years - mid- twenties, I guess. I thought it was crap - stupid, you know? Barely readable. I think all Salinger is crap. But I have friends who insist that if I had read it in high school (or earlier, even) it would have meant everything to me. And I know other people who read Salinger late (like me) and were equally unimpressed.

Comments?

- H

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I read it in high school and I think it is the single most overrated work in American literature. So there.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

My mom used to be really into Stephen King. She had all of his books up until the mid eighties. I know he's published about 5789240 books since then, I don't think she has those.

Anyway, she had "Cujo" on her nightstand and one summer day when I was probably 8 or 9 or so I decided to read it and got scared silly. Funny thing is, I don't even know if anything bad or scary happened in the part I was reading, or if I was just scared because I knew I was supposed to be scared.

Of course, I also got scared by The Ghost and Mr. Chicken when I was little. Tell anyone and I'll kill you.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I'm not even going to go there on the whole gaping issue, so don't worry.

I remember reading Judy Blume's Then Again... Maybe I Won't when I was 7 or 8. I was distinctly confused about what a noctural emission was, so you can imagine how all of the adolescent male themes completely confounded me. I haven't read it in years, but I'm pretty sure there's underage drunkeness and maybe even a "funny uncle" or something. Eww.

Another "too early" one was Alas Babylon (post-apocalyptic, v. dark) when I was about 10. What was I thinking? So disturbing, and I didn't read anything remotely scary for years afterwards.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I read Catcher in the Rye in high school and didn't understand what the fuss was about. I reread it when I was about 20 to try to figure out what I missed and I still haven't figured it out. People still continued to talk about the brilliance of Salinger, so I read Franny and Zooey about six months ago (at the age of 26) and I still don't get Salinger. I don't think it matters when you read it, his writing just resonates with some people and not with others. I never identified with Holden Caulfield or any of his other characters. They never seemed like real people to me.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

My mom is a counselor, so we had all sorts of books about mental illness lying about, and I ended up reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden when I was ten or eleven. Bad, bad idea. I was convinced I was just like Deborah and would end up in a Ward D somewhere. (In retrospect, it probably jump-started all my teenage angst...)

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Catcher in the Rye's achievement is that it convinced millions of people to read hundreds of pages of continued and uninterrupted whining.

Try doing that yourself- it's pretty hard.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Yeah, I've been trying for three years and I've only convinced thousands of people. It's hard work, man.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

To really get the big numbers, you have to get yourself on the banned list in a few good junior high schools.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Then, as an act of selfless charity, I say we get Beth banned from Sacramento Junior High.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

(for the children, of course)

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I can't believe this is my first post. Here I go:

I believe what was going on with Lucy in the Godfather was that the walls in her vagina had collapsed. If I understand this, it's not uncommon, especially after pregnancies. I've known 2 other women who had to have their walls, um...shored up? They were after exremely difficult births.

By the way, it's the wall between vagina and bowels that I'm talking about. I dont' know if that makes any difference. But what we're talking about is not just some girl who got fucked into a canyon. It's a medical problem.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

You know, I read a lot of books that were full of sex when I was a young kid (_Color Purple_ at age 7, anyone? not to mention torrid romances) but I really don't think they messed me up as far as I can tell. Oh, no, the honors for *that* belong entirely to one book and one book alone: Henry Miller's _Quiet Days in Clichy_. I don't know why , particularly, but whenever I try to examine that squirmy part of my psyche that sees sex as titillating, horrifying, shameful, icky, and overwhelmingly fascinating all at the same time, reading that book LONG before I could understand it appears to be the reason.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

The Book of Revelation (a.k.a the Apocalypse). Heeeeeeeewack. Now there's some f*cked up sh*t. I've never recovered from it. Sometimes when I'm lying insomniac with my eyes closed, I still see myself traveling between the horns and heads of that seven-headed, ten-horned abomination thingy. It's like the long sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only instead of flying between panels of psychedelic colors I'm flying between these horns and heads, and insect parts. Somehow the plague of locusts from Exodus gets mixed up in this.

I was also terribly disturbed when Esther got Mordecai hanged on a Gibbet, when Judith slew Holofernes, David had twenty young men kill each other as his entertainment, and when Judas Iscariot fell on the field he bought with 30 pieces of silver and burst wide open. (I forget if that is in one of the approved gospels or some Gnostic sh*t).

I'm telling you folks, don't let your kids read the Bible unsupervised until they're old enough.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

_The Bell Jar_. And _Carrie_. In one summer. WHEN I WAS ELEVEN. Ick. --e j, who resented her uterus for years

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I tried to read The World According to Garp when I was maybe seven years old, and then i got to the part where a man brings Garp's mom a glass of creamy liquid. At that point, I thought "I'm not old enough for this," put the book down and didn't try to read it again until high school.

I'm another victim of all Piers Anthony's crap...I think I read every Xanth novel he wrote until I turned 12 and suddenly I noticed how bad they were. And I read Bio of a Space Tyrant, which somehow manages to be disgusting, perverse, and dull.

Read Xaviera Hollander when I was 12. I don't think it did any damage. Up until that point most of what I knew about sex came from science fiction, so it was probably an improvement...

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

The Book of Revelation and some of the related Hal Lindsey books would be mine. I lived in fear of locusts and rivers of blood.

Jaws might have been another. I read it when it came out in 1974 or '75, so I would have been 11 or so. I still remember the phrase "her vagina yawned open" (related to a subplot in the book that was expunged from the movie.) The fact that that phrase stayed with me and nothing about the shark did probably says a lot.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

I remember liking the first two or three volumes of the Space Tyrant series, until it evolved into a social allegory that was so transparent as to be almost satire. But I haven't read it in maybe 15 years. I'd like to give it another try but I'm not sure I still have it.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

Chalk me up as another one for The Color Purple. I can't remember how old I was for that one, but I was young enough to be completely traumatized by the scene where they were talking about their clits melting. I was horrified that mind would just disappear someday.

I also got into my mom's Jane Auel books around 12 years old, but I was such a prude I went through them and either tore out the copious sex scenes, or blacked them out with marker.

Yet I distinctly remember sitting out in the garage at the age of 8 reading all my dad's Penthouse mags.

Weird kid.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001