Here is a complete list of the books I was forbidden to read as a child, please add your own in the comments below:
Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews, age twelve
I did not allow myself to finish this book; I found it at a garage sale in the summer between sixth and seventh grade and thought the cover made it look like a cool, spooky mystery. It was not a cool, spooky mystery. By the time I got to the part where Chris and Cathy Do It, I knocked on my parents’ door, handed it to them, and said, “I don’t think I should have this,” then spent the rest of my adolescence trying to forget. I would not kiss another human being for another five years, and I think this is why.
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner, age thirteen
We were at the airport, and Dad offered to buy each one of us a book, and I wanted this one, because I wanted my dad to think that I read Faulkner, and he looked very serious and said he thought I should wait another year or two and bought me the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf instead, thus saving me from another round of tortured Southern incest fiction until much later.
That is all, thank you for your time!
I don’t think my parents forbade me from reading anything? I don’t recall them ever saying I couldn’t read this or that, and they never even cared what I had out from the library (probably because I had a huge stack of books every week and they couldn’t keep up with that). I realize now they sound a bit neglectful in that aspect and that’s probably why I read WIDEACRE at aboot 15, which contains an actual functioning man trap.
I read “A World Lit Only By Fire” when I was probably even younger than that. My parents kind of realized it wasn’t appropriate after I finished it. But I had access to the library anyway (walking distance) so I think they figured if I wanted to read something, I would do it anyway.
Oh my god, I did too! It was on the shelf of our vacation cottage, and always looked intriguing, so I finally caved and read it at about 11 or 12 years old at the very oldest. Of course I read Clan of the Cave Bears at age 10 (and learned what rape was!), so I was long ruined by then…
I can’t remember my parents ever forbidding me to read anything either.
They SHOULD have probably warned me when I picked up Judy Blume’s Wifey from the bookshelf. It was Judy Blume! I like her! THAT BOOK WAS WAY DIFFERENT.
My mom tried to forbid me from Then Again, Maybe I Won’t when I was in 4th grade after I asked what a wet dream was. I was already halfway through so it didn’t work.
(It’s pretty much the boy version of Are You There God?)
I had no idea what the heck a wet dream was when I read that! I think even in Are You There God, I was confused by the period related things (although that could have just been because by the time I read it, pads no longer required belts).
same but Summer Sisters
HOLY FUCK THAT’S THE NAME OF THE SERIES I READ. I was 15-16, and read all the way up to the second book.
Mine didn’t either. I read anything I could get my hands on, including stuff definitely intended for readers considerably older than me, like Roald Dahl’s short stories and all of my mum’s child development books. I read a lot of books with sex scenes.
Also, when I started secondary school (so, 11), the librarian there observed my voracious reading habits and presented me with a box of books she thought I would like from the Upper School library, including To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Fahrenheit 451. It was like being in Matilda.
(Actually, my parents did nag me not to read the many trashy books I devoured as a teen, ever when they were well below my reading ability, because they wanted me to read proper books instead of Sweet Valley University. But I ignored this.)
Oh, hey, my mother did the ‘don’t read the trashy books!’ thing too. She gave up by the time I was a teenager and I think she was mostly just trying to get me not to read all the Babysitters Club books, but nevertheless, she tried. There was bribery involved.
My parents were very disappointed in my Babysitters Club habit.
I’m still not sure why my mum didn’t stop me from picking up Roald Dahl’s ‘My Uncle Oswald’, but really, it was probably because ‘oh, thank god, she’s found something to read and will stop complaining for at least a couple of hours’.
Hey, fellow huge stack of books from the library every week friend.
My stack of books habit was only monitored insofar as I was told that I couldn’t call my grandmother to ask her to pick me + school backpack + library books up more than once per month. “But she goes to the library, too!” was not a valid excuse*, apparently, so I was forced to coordinate with her in advance.
* just because she normally went at 10 when I was still in school. Harrumph.
We could get 20 books out at a time, and I made sure to take advantage of that every week. I still feel deeply betrayed when I join libraries that don’t allow as many.
Only 15 for me, but to be fair, my scrawny middle-school arms couldn’t carry more than 15 mixed paper and hardbacks the mile walk home (when I was forbidden to call my grandmother.)
The library was only a block from my middle school, so it was easy to return books a couple at a time as I finished them, but I never caught on that it would be easier to return a couple / check out a couple more. It was always check out 15 / get through the stack / check out another 15.
We lived about a five-minute walk from the library, which was extremely convenient for carrying large piles of books home.
We used to have a 10 (?) book limit, and my sister and I would coordinate to make sure we had a good range of books. I remember when they made it unlimited borrowing… it was like Christmas. I nearly died of excitement.
Ditto. My parents never forbade any reading material. If we found it and wanted to read it, they trusted our judgement about it.
Yep, I remember two librarians, in two different cities, telling me I couldn’t read books because I wasn’t old enough–my mom would get very, very annoyed and tell them that her kid was reading and could read what she wanted. I went through a “banned books” phase in around grade seven; many of them bored the crap out of me, but telling me that a book was out of bounds would’ve just made me get it anyway, so that was wise of mom.
Granted, I grew up to study pornography among other things for my doctorate, so this might say something too ;-).
Tell me about this porn-related doctorate…
Ah, the porn wound up minimized but informed what I was saying about depictions of death in eighteenth-century novels. An academic can take the sexiness out of just about anything. . .
AHAHAHA WIDEACRE. Got damn I loved those books as a wee lass. I definitely should NOT have been allowed to read them, but I think my parents were fooled by the fact that Philippa Gregory wrote historical fiction as well.
Yup, my parents are big readers themselves and they had bookshelves everywhere and I could just, you know, help myself to everything – including Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John D. MacDonald, books like The Case of Lucy Bending, Our Bodies Ourselves, one that I never remember the name of but it featured a lesbian named Bobby, and one called Be Your Own Sex Therapist that horrified me because it had a picture of a man with an erect penis and THAT could never fit in THERE.
omg so did I (read Wideacre at that age), so titillating 😀
I don’t think I was ever banned any books. And the only movie I was ever warned off was Reservoir Dogs, which, watching later was relatively tame compared to everything else out at the time.
My mother limited herself to skimming for the racy bits before I was allowed to check something out or buy, but mostly my parents encouraged me to read widely and voraciously and weren’t very concerned about what the material was. They were way more active about film and tv censoring.
It says a lot about my upbringing and sex ed that I mostly learned about sex via the racy bits mom missed…
I’m impressed at the racy bits scanning! My parents never even did that. For music, sometimes, but not books.
…Though my mom decided to finally slow down my voracious reading of her Discover magazines after they put out a sexuality issue? IDK, I was like, 10, probably, and had read all her copies starting when I was 8.
Oh sex remains a hot button issue (my mother used to measure how high above my knee shorts hit, which led to wearing lots of boys’ shorts). I am convinced she’s only vaguely suspicious that I’m queer because she still leaves the room whenever sex comes up. Adherence to the church may wane, but Catholic guilt is forever!
I remember being absolutely delighted at coming across my mother’s trashy vampire erotica while digging through boxes of books in the basement (maybe 6th grade?)–both for myself and for the proof she explored her own sexual pleasure, even surreptitiously..
I have only very vague memories of the sexuality issue of Discover,, even though my father was a devout subscriber and I liked the photos. I would have been maybe 8 or 9? I do remember a rash of articles on then so-called “hermaphrodites” and then a bunch on the supposed gay gene in the later 90s.
The one that lead to “omg we need to pay attention these” was talking about viagra and possibly stuff on how animals signaled sexual availability. I’ll have to see if I can find the cover; it was wild.
ETA: It was this one! http://discovermagazine.com/1999/sep
My older sister used to do that for me! Our dad really loved the “Heralds of Valdemar” series by Mercedes Lackey, and would give us the books once he’d finished reading them. My sister would read them first, and then say “You can read this, but you aren’t allowed to read chapter seven”. Somehow, it didn’t occur to me to wonder what I was missing until I was about twelve.
Mine never forbade me, either! I once read a scene in a book where these boarding school girls were all aflutter over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, so next time I went to the library I checked it out. I was probably 9 and VERY curious about Sex Stuff. I remember overhearing my Mom mentioning it to my Dad, but neither ever said anything to me. They weren’t into the censorship of media, although I remember wanting to rent Basketball Diaries SO bad (in my Leo phase) and they were like ‘nah’
I did the exact same! I wonder which book we read that referenced it? I found it on my parents’ bookshelf among the old-timey books, and then proceeded to try and read it, but it was painfully dull, so then I just leafed through looking for the sex scenes, and was pretty disappointed in them (or missed the actual good ones?).
My parents never once banned me from reading anything. When I was out of books to read from my own shelves or the library, I would raid their stashes and end up reading sometimes weirdly sexual 70s and 80s scifi from my dad and nearly always weirdly sexual 70s and 80s bodice rippers from my mom. Most of the weird stuff went right over my head for years, thankfully. The only time I was ever banned from reading anything was as a type of grounding when I got into major trouble, and then I was banned from reading EVERYTHING that wasn’t school-related.
Oddly enough, they were MUCH stricter about music. Until I was around 13 or 14 they had to preview every album I bought before I was allowed to listen to it. I guess they were so gung-ho pro-literacy that they thought any book was great news because I was READING!
My parents didn’t ban any books either. However, on the music front, when that song “Get Busy” by Sean Paul came out, it annoyed the crap out of me (on so many levels, but mainly that it was just some guy saying “hey, female sex objects, shake your stuff”), but my brother bought it. And he was about 11 at the time and I said to my dad “ugh, do you know what that song is about?” and made a big stink and my dad made my brother return the CD.
It’s the small victories 😀
My mother for all her faults believes strongly to never censor reading material because kids know when something is confusing or too much for them, especially since she was so proud that I was hyperlexic & could read at a “high level” at young age which on one hand was great because I was allowed to have all my great grandmothers backlogged nation geographics from like age 8, but also not great bc I read Face On The Milk Carton (which yesterdays post reminded me of) in 3rd grade & now I’m fascinated w/ cults so, it was a trade off really. (THAT BEING SAID I definitely read way more weird murder books than weird sexy books)
OH MY GOSH THE MILK CARTON! I read so much Caroline B. Cooney as a kid, because my older sister was reading it. Joys of being a younger sibling.
It was an embarrassingly big influence on my tastes in fiction
My mom’s the same way. We’ve actually talked more about it now that I’m older because one of her sisters has gotten really worked up over her granddaughter reading stuff that she believes to be inappropriate. And my mom tried to tell her that telling kids they can’t read things is just going to make them more determined to read it.
There were only a few books my mom tried to discourage me from reading because she thought they would be too much for me to handle at my age. I read them anyway and she was right but I lived.
My parents were way more picky about our television habits and what we watched there and the music we listened to.
OMG WIDEACRE! I read that enitre series right around the same age as you. When I moved out, I left a lot of books at home as my first tiny apartment had no where to even stack them. A couple years ago, my mom was cleaning out our bookshelves and she saved a stack to read that looked interesting… including WIDEACRE. She called me up, absolutely horrified, and was like, ” You read this book?! How could I have allowed you to read that?!”
lol, good times.
I’ve never, legit, heard of this book. WTH is in it???
From what I remember, the over-arching themes include: murder (most foul), mantraps, incest, manipulation, fabricated rape to cover up multiple incest pregnancies, and maybe an actual rape?
Just, you know, light reading.
Well then.
Like, you know how Scarlett O’Hara is totally devoted to Tara and will do anything for Tara and Tara, Tara, Tara? Wideacre is sort of like that, except in Sussex. The girl child loses it when she realizes she won’t inherit and then there’s the murder(s) and incest and she ruins a few men’s’ lives, and then there’s some incest babies and more murders and the peasants are revolting and they set a fire or something? But she still loves Wideacre.
What is it with 15 year olds and Wideacre? My friend from school had the series and it just got passed around our friendship group. And then when I went to uni, I found out that virtually every other girl I met who had been to an all-girl’s school had the same thing at exactly the same age: someone (usually someone with slightly conservative parents) had the trilogy and the books moved through their group like some sort of black market for smut.
I don’t think my mother really forbade me reading much of anything either, apart from one time when I almost picked up a romance novel at Waldenbooks. That said, I was pretty much a toe-the-line kind of kid, and I wouldn’t have wanted to read anything I thought my mom might disapprove of.
I remember pretty distinctly sometime between 8 and 10 my dad seeing me reading Erica Jong’s Witches, which features illustrations of women having sex with the devil and calling my mom at work to see if she was okay with me reading it. She was.
My parents never forbade me from reading anything either. They basically had nothing to say about my reading choices, which was great. My father-in-law reminisced about how they forced Spouse to check out fiction books from the library because he didn’t read anything but books about tanks, and I was like “…why would you try to force your kid to read anything? Did you think that would make him like them, because…that’s not really how that works.”
The rest of my media (music/tv shows/movies) was strictly censored, which my brother and I mostly obeyed. But we could read whatever wanted, which led to me reading Gone with the Wind in 5th grade just after I turned 10. And reading it in a week, because my dad bet me I couldn’t so of course I had to. My 5th grade teacher didn’t know what to do with the child who was “not paying attention in class” who knew where we were in the lesson and was reading an adult novel at the same time.
When my mom was 10 or 11 or so, she was halfway through reading a book when my grandmother discovered her reading it, freaked out, and took the book away. There was some adult content of a sexual nature in there, but my mom was already past it and hadn’t noticed because she was too naive. That made a big impression on her, so while she would try to steer me away from romance novels as an older teen/college student (because she wanted me to read books with more “substance”; except that I did that for 9 months of the year for an English degree and needed mindless reading the rest of the time), she otherwise didn’t monitor what we read. Which led to me thinking back in my late teens/early 20s and realizing, oh wait, that was almost a sex scene in [insert book here].
I never had any formal restrictions, except for the Sweet Valley High series, for reasons that remain inexplicable to me even today. The books weren’t available in my local library yet so I had to buy it and so she saw what I was getting. She read it first to make sure it was appropriate for 5th-grade me. This is the only book/series I remember her doing this for so it really stood out.
I’m always amused when I think back to our bookshelves in my childhood home, which had all kinds of genres and which were usually not super appropriate for someone younger than a teenager. Dad read mostly SciFi and Mom liked romance novels, plus scattered biography, science writing, and comedy books. I learned a LOT from Mom’s romance novels. Maybe I was smart enough to not read them where they could see me, but she must have noticed them periodically disappearing from the shelves. It never occurred to either parent to move some of the dirtier books off the bottom shelves of the bookcases in the living room. But Sweet Valley High needed to be thoroughly vetted!
Fistbump! My parents were so busy censoring all of my tv/movie intake that they forgot about books. So I read all the romance novels and horror books and VC Andrews and smut I wanted to because books were…less dangerous, I guess?
Meanwhile, I was not allowed to watch Ren and Stimpy because it was “too gross.” Or something.
Yes this. I was technically not supposed to read romance novels or “adult” books, but book covers worked wonders and no one ever asked to, like, see inside the books or anything.
I am here for another round of V.C. Andrews reminiscing.
My parents threw away (threw away! sob!) the copy of Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Fairies that my grandmother gave me because it had penises and took the whole magic creature thing a little too far. I wasn’t even twelve years old. I learned to hide books really well after that.
That is a goddamn tragedy! That book was actually a staple in my household, and i recall being pretty freaked by some of the faeries in it growing up. Peg Powler was literally reaching for a child’s foot from her water grave! But what a great mythological text, illustrated beautifully and written like an anthropological notebook, of creatures existing outside of the confines of human laws or morality!
Like many above, I had 0 books banned as a child, and in fact read the Mists of Avalon at the tender age of 12. God, what an awful book, but it felt so adult reading it!
I can still see that image, with the green wash and her pointed teeth! Yessss. I loved her. Also the Glaistig. I wanted to be one. Still kinda do.
DITTO. I had resolved to name any girl-child I had Lamia because Keats, then Glaistig because of this image. Then I resolved to have no children, which solved those problems nicely.
That girl would have been fierce as hell, fuck yeah.
I still have a couple of those Froud books and I love them.
They’re so BEAUTIFUL!
No! I am so sorry. I have my grandmother’s copy of that book and it is a treasured possession.
Every once in a while I think I should look for a used copy but them I remember what our bookshelves look like and… no.
I, too, am HERE for V.C. Andrews reminiscing, and also Brian Froud! I loved that book.
My da did not forbid me to read V.C. Andrews – I was about the same age as Mallory when I found Flowers in the Attic – but reading that book was the end of my dad periodically reading the books I liked in order to keep up with what was going on in my teenaged brain. He had a Very Disapproving Brow while reading the entirety of a book, and his commentary was limited to “I don’t get it”.
It was not Flowers that formed me tho. It was My Sweet Audrina. I still have issues with unsynchronized time pieces.
Looking through these responses, I have to say the late 70s/early 80s were a weird fucking time for mainstream literature. Your mention of My Sweet Audrina reminded me of Audrey Rose and just…wow. Also, Erica Jong. Wow. Wow.
Not just mainstream lit! Brian Froud designed the muppets for Labyrinth, which I think explains my noping the hell out of that film at the tender age of – what, like 4? Those long limbed creature that take their heads off, man. I still can barely. *shudders*
TRUE.
I, otoh, still love that aesthetic. Creepy/beautiful is my fave.
I’ve largely come around. Just… those limbs. Those heads. So… irreverent while not being attached. So _mean_. Awful/awesome.
That is because it is the best and you are created fully of awesomeness and wonder.
I have a Creepy/Sexy tag on Tumblr if you wanna check out some of the posts. Pretty sure everything’s SFW, if weird.
wahhhh that link isn’t working. Um, here, go to this post and click the #creepy/sexy tag at the bottom. That will take you to the URL that the link above says doesn’t exist.
Those things were legit terrifying.
Ugh, I reread Audrina for the Tomato Nation Book Club and remembered it as scandalous trashy fun, but as an adult it’s one of those books that is pure Idiot Plot–that is, nothing that happens in the book would have happened if every single character were not an idiot.
I’m not talking about all the Southern Gothic fripperies and trim, like Vera’s conveniently breaking bones and whats-her-name with the blinding prisms and the legless figure skater or even all the incest/child rape/sexing: I mean how NOBODY in this town notices that people die in this household like, every other week! The police are out there like fucking clockwork for yet another “fall down the stairs” but just accept whatever batshit story about manicures and how you can’t push somebody from the attic until AFTER THE TOP COAT DRIES and leave.
The most embarrassing book related thing I’ve ever done is to give my mom a copy of Flowers in the Attic as a gift when I was maybe 12. I hadn’t read the book but several of my friends loved it and I figured I’d give it to my mom and read it myself too. And then (after I gave it to her) I read it and I was horrified. We never discussed it.
Yeah, never mentioning it again was probably the best course of action there.
Yeah. That’s one time good old WASP repression served us well.
Reminds me of a story. A lady at work was telling me once about how her mother had been in the hospital for some reason. To entertain her during this time, Lady from Work had offered to read to her and asked her what she wanted to hear. Her mom said, “Romance.” So Lady from Work went to the bookstore and asked them to recommend some romance. They gave her Fifty Shades of Grey. She knew nothing about it, nor did her mother. They luckily didn’t get far enough into the story for things to become Highly Regrettable.
Hah! That’s like the time Mr Cleo’s parents took his grandmother to see Chasing Amy, thinking it was a typical rom-com.
So, I have never read Flowers in the Attic, and since it is spoken of on the Toast with relative frequency, I finally bit the bullet and read the Wikipedia summary.
O_O
O_O
O_O
D:
I…don’t understand why this book was so popular. I am a you-do-you-as-long-as-everyone-is-consenting kind of lady, but holy shitballs, this is some weird insect fic that I would expect to see on like, a kinkmeme prompt on LiveJournal. I mean, I guess it sold over 40 million copies worldwide because LiveJournal didn’t exist yet?
Also, I actually barked loud with cynical laughter when I read this character summary:
Bartholomew “Bart” Winslow: Second husband of Corrine. He is a trophy husband and marries her thinking that she doesn’t have any children. Cathy is shocked to discover that he is eight years younger than Corrine.
“Cathy is shocked to discover that he is eight years younger than Corrine.”
That is what’s shocking to you about this whole situation, Cathy? Not the incest with your brother, the time that he rapes you, the constant physical abuse from your mother and grandmother, or the fact that your mother is trying to poison you with arsenic-laced doughnuts? It’s the fact that your mom’s second husband is *GASP*…a whole eight years younger?
I don’t think they were popular because they were reasonable or quality literature.
I have no idea why it was so popular – it obviously tapped into something in the popular psyche. Maybe because all these repressed and hidden things (like abuse) were just starting to be discussed / acknowledged culturally?
It also took the gothic genre to its illogical extreme. If I knew why gothics were popular, I might have a theory about why this particular version of gothics on psychedelics was so popular. But I don’t.
(lol, i typed ‘insect fic’ instead of ‘incest fic’ and that takes it to a whole other level. i can’t tell if the level is weirder than the original premise or not, tho.)
Yes, Cathy’s focus was somewhat off.
Pet Sematary, age 10.. obviously
I remember being on the bus home from middle school reading Graveyard Shift and someone said my name in the middle of the story about rats and I shrieked in fear (it was my stop and I hadn’t noticed.) The whole bus laughed at me and I was teased about it for weeks.
Me too! I check it out at the library, walked in the front door, showed it to my mother, and was promptly sent back to the library to return it.
My mother was a bit horrified at me reading Jaws, because of the swearing, and my best friend’s mother was horrified at Virginia Andrews because of the sauce. We weren’t forbidden though, and looking back my mother swore worse than Jaws…
I read a lot of stuff far too young to understand it, and rereading some of them as an adult has caused a number of epiphanies!
Adult re-readings are the BEST. I was absolutely astonished how much I’d missed in “Rebecca”!
The epiphanies are real!
Re-reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole as an adult is one of life’s great pleasures
There are far too many references and jokes that just went straight over my head as a child.
I am re-reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel right now, and man did I miss a lot of layers in THAT book the first time. (Though part of it is that I am concurrently reading the amazing sequel, Children of God, which does legitimately add layers as well.) But still! How could I have even made sense of this book as a teenager? It mystifies me that I remember liking it, because I think 90% of it must have gone right over my head. (But yes I was allowed to read it despite the Adult Themes because my parents never had any clue what I was reading.)
The weird sex stuff in Jaws freaked me out as a kid.
My mother wouldn’t have the Arthur (the anteater or aardvark or whatever he is) books in the house, or the Berenstain Bears, because she hated them and thought they were preachy (and preached bad ideas) and had cruddy artwork as well.
She also told me I should wait on “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” when I was nine and reading the Bagthorpe Saga and thought all books with characters named Tess in them must obviously be great.
He is an aardvark and I know that because on the animated children’s show based on the books but with much better artwork the do a spelling rap and now I always know how to spell aardvark… much like how I learned to spell bananas.
I will go to my grave remembering nothing but how to spell the word aardvark.
Gotta say I’m with your mom 100% on the Berenstain Bears.
She was also the one who told my brother it was OK to cut out and save the loving inscription on the copy of “Love You Forever” someone had given my niece, and put the rest in the recycling bin.
My mom knows her kids’ books.
Recently, I was browsing the eBook section of my local library, looking for things to read with my nephews (aged 4 to 9). Tess of the d’Ubervilles was listed as a children’s book.
I then had to explain to my family why I found this hilariously inappropriate.
Gaaaaah!
Whaaaat? Even without the rape and such, wouldn’t it be horribly boring for a child to read? I mean, I loved it, but I was 17 when I read it. That is some hilariously bad age recommendation.
I don’t like the Berenstein Bears books for my kiddo but it is because (particularly with the newer books) the grammar is often terrible. I have actually corrected the grammar in a couple of her “Little Critter” books (again, the newer ones) with tape that I wrote over. A couple others have been relegated to the shelf she can’t reach due to sexist messaging.
That tape idea is *good*.
The sexist messaging part reminds me of how my sister and I kept asking when we were getting those other two Narnia books, “The Last Battle” and “The Horse and His Boy” and how my mother finally caved but only when we were old enough to talk about how authors aren’t always right.
I have a poster that is supposed to teach my Korean vocabulary, and on the line for family members, only the mom is holding something, and it’s plate of cookies. I put post-it tape over her from the neck down and drew on just a shirt + arms because screw that.
Post-it tape! It covers a multitude of sexist BS!
Wait,I know why The Last Battle has issues,but don’t remember what was wrong with The Horse and His Boy. I read it at 11 and was obsessed with horses,so problematic bits probably went sailing over my head.
I remember it mostly being pretty racist? But I can’t for the life of me remember what could have been wrong with The Last Battle? I remember there was a guy and a unicorn and the unicorn gores someone at some point, but that is pretty much it.
I was wondering if it was hella racist; kind of suspected it might have been.
It’s been a long time since The Last Battle, but I’d guess the issue would be that Susan basically went to hell because she became more interested in Wordly Things like lipstick and boys than Narnia. But even though the boys had also stopped coming to Narnia, they seemed to get a pass? There’s probably more that I don’t remember but that even bugged me at the time, because Susan was my fave.
Oh shit, I had completely forgotten that the kids died! How could I forget that! I really need to re-read some of my childhood favorites now.
Also, everyone else dies, but they get to live for eternity in Narnia/Heaven, so it’s fine (never mind Susan losing her entire family at a stroke; who cares about that? We’re in Heaven and it’s great!).
The Last Battle was racist as well, from what I can remember.
It was racist and Aravis gets disproportionately punished (for drugging her slave girl so she could run away). The Last Battle has the whole Susan-not-getting-into-Paradise thing and the idea that being dead is better than being alive.
And in The Last Battle there’s the idea that any follower of a non-Christian religion (or anyone who doesn’t worship Aslan) is actually really being a Christian whenever they do good things, whatever they might have thought.
Ana Mardoll is in the middle of a read-through/deconstruction of A Horse and His Boy right now! She is very thorough about the many issues therein, and has done all the other Narnia books except for The Last Battle.
That’s such an important lesson to learn. I remember reading “The Last Battle” for the first time and being HEARTBROKEN about Susan’s fate, especially because I had always identified so strongly with her. The idea that she suffered through losing her entire family in a violent accident just because she had a loss of faith was horrifying, and even as a fairly religious young person, it put some dents in my sense of a fundamentally benevolent Jesus/Aslan.
My mother turned a number of male heroes in childrens’ books into girls. (These were read-aloud books, not ones I was reading myself.) I only realized when I came across one of them at a cousin’s house, I think, and was utterly surprised that it had been about a boy all along.
She taught nursery school for a long time and did this with classroom books, too. I mean, some books are beyond such salvaging, and it didn’t help with any weird racism issues (Pippi Longstocking, damn it!), but it was a pretty good way to
I don’t like the parenting! I don’t like the art! I think the characters are nasty! there is no loss to avoiding them!!
My parents also banned the Berenstain Bears, mostly because they objected to the regressive gender norms. Bless them.
This is TV so it doesn’t quite count, but your comment reminded me of how my mom banned me from watching Care Bears because it was so saccharine and unrealistic to expect people (or bears) to always be happy.
A+ use of parentheses (also Mom-ing.)
My mother didnt forbid me, but warned me off Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was 12 or so and showed an interest in it. But that was because Thomas Hardy books never, ever end and are mostly about rolling heath, not for any moral reason.
Tess of the D’Urbevilles was the first and only Hardy book I’ve ever read. Forced into it at university. Hated it with a deep and eternal passion.
As a mom I also had Opinions about what I was willing to have in the house and be required to read and reread and rereread… Your mom is COMPLETELY CORRECT HERE!!!! bad art and bad parenting means Arthur didn’t cut it, nor did the Berenstain Bears, nor pretty much any disney based book, or actually Sesame Street – plus the heavy handed lessons were SO BORING. We existed on a steady diet of Sandra Boynton, and Max and Ruby (because Max is subversive and hilarious) and a couple handfuls of rando stuff from my youth, almost all with the genders swapped.
Once they could read, I made every effort to read what they were reading, but didn’t ban anything. I did recommend things, or in a couple cases recommend they wait a while for a book (frex, the Vimes books) but no real restrictions. No judgement either. Each kid had moments of attempting to read all the modestly crapulous books in a series: Magic Treehouse, Junie B. jones, Animorphs, … there must have been others. And each time I remembered the pleasure I took from reading ALL the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books I could lay hold of, and just smiled and nodded.
I think I parented well around reading. less so on other topics.
I was thinking “my parents never banned anything,” but yeah, no Bernstein bears in our house either. My mom HATED those books. Also Barney. I was allowed to watch rated R movies at any age (if I wanted to- leaving if I didn’t like it was always okay), but Barney was banned from the house.
Sounds like your mom and my mom have similar tastes. Mine never actually told me not to read anything, but I could always tell when she thought a book was preachy or badly written – there’d just be a vaguely repelled look on her face when the book came up. I read a whole bunch of Orson Scott Card as a teen, but I knew better than to try to discuss his books with my mom, because I had a vague sense that if pushed she could offer a lot of very compelling reasons why they were bad.
A few Narnia books popped up in our house – gifts, I think – and they always got the Scully Eyebrow of Vague Disdain from my mom. I’m not sure which bothered her more, the Christian propaganda or all the telling-not-showing.
The only thing she explicitly told me not to read was Sanctuary, when I was a teenager, but she wasn’t actually forbidding me to read it – just warning me, as a friend, that it was unpleasant.
Ah. I loved the Berenstain Bears as a kid but hadn’t thought about it much since. But man, reading this thread reminds me how Traditional Gender Roles they are and also how incredibly preachy. Like, I bit my nails on the reg as a kid, and was given (and somehow enjoyed reading) the one about how they taught Sister to stop biting her nails. Because Lessons. We also had a few very preachy books featuring animals both mythical and real (Serendipity? The ones with the weird pink dinosaur as the mascot?) that for some reason I enjoyed, even though they were incredibly obviously all about Morals.
Also I have a very fond place in my heart for Narnia and I want to share that with my future kids… But also maybe will do some filtering of the more racist and sexist content? The extent of the religious stuff BLEW MY MIND when I reread as a teen; it went completely over my head as a kid.
I think I just liked books where animals did human things. (Redwall was my ultimate fave.)
I don’t remember ever having a book taken away, but my parents were not big into monitoring/censoring my reading, plus I was sneaky about stuff I thought they might take issue with.
This was me, too. I read so MANY books that they probably couldn’t keep track/monitor my reading anyway, so I definitely read things they would have disapproved of without them ever knowing. Movies/TV on the other hand….those were strictly monitored and I had to follow a host of rules that none of my other friends had to follow. For example, I wasn’t allowed to watch Labyrinth (rated PG, also goblins/magic), so I didn’t fess up to watching (and ADORING) it at a friend’s house until years later. Such was life.
So much yep here.
I wasn;t allowed to watch Hey Arnold for some reason? But I could read anything, including a book I swiped from the table when I was 10 that still scars me.
Yeah, there were a lot of cartoons I wasn’t allowed to watch because they were too violent (like Looney Tunes), and I remember my dad insisting on watching 10 Things I Hate About You before I was allowed to buy it (even though I had already seen it at a friend’s).
Same! I used to sneak my grandmother’s romance novels off her shelf and bring them back later in the week. I assume she noticed? But my parents certainly didn’t.
My mother got really twitchy that I’d even taken Bridges of Madison County off the bookshelf (to stack some books while playing? I don’t remember). So I got the message pretty early on.
Yeah, the sneakiness was key in my household. Getting to keep my own library card helped out with this A LOT.
I don’t know if I was completely forbidden to read any certain book, but as a young teen I once bought a Danielle Steele book at the airport when I was with my dad. I had no idea who Steele was, but I was a ballet dancer at the time and the book had a picture of a ballerina on the front. My dad let me buy it, but then he took it from me and sort of scanned through the whole thing and frowned at certain bits before reluctantly letting me have it back.
I could read absolutely anything I wanted — my parents actually condoned me reading Judy Blume and bought me Judy Blume diaries — but I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV til my teen years or buy the Extreme album with “More than Words” on it.
MTV was right out. And I am old enough that The Simpsons was considered inappropriate when it first came out and we weren’t allowed to watch it. I didn’t get into it until late middle school/high school, maybe.
Nobody cared what I read, though, and I remember embarrassing my mom by asking her what a wet dream was while we were driving someplace.
I asked my mom what a wet dream was while evacuating a hurricane because one of the only available books was Judy Blume.
Yep, my parents weren’t big readers and I think they were just happy I loved to read, so not a lot of policing there.
But we were absolutely NOT allowed to watch MTV, or The Simpsons, or Ren & Stimpy. And sometimes we’d be sent out of the room when Friends was on.
Same! No MTV, no Simpsons, and definitely no Roseanne. My mother hated the family dynamics in those shows– e.g. that the parents bickered and the kids were disrespectful and she considered them toxic and unhealthy. Looking back I kinda see what she meant. The funny thing is, I voraciously read fantasy books as a kid, specifically the Redwall books, to the point that I was getting in trouble in school for reading in class, but my mother abhors fantasy. To this day she will not watch or read anything that is sci-fi or fantasy oriented at all, and anything animated is automatically “for kids” and thus has no value as art. I have no idea how I started reading fantasy but I never stopped (I still read 50-60 books a year) and it drives my mother crazy because she thinks they are trashy.
That’s funny because my parents loved Roseanne and we al watched it all the time, because where else could you see real people like us on TV? All the other shows had (sometimes inexplicably) wealthy people with champagne problems.
Yeah I hear you– my mother definitely came from an upper-middle-class WASP-y English home where everything was always pristinely clean and nobody ever fought out loud, just simmered quietly because Being Upset or Speaking Your Mind was Unladylike. I realized as a grew up that she had a big bias against blue-collar families and hobbies that made her a huge snob. Not as bad as *her* mom, mind you, but definitely snobby. I think that also informed her dislike for fantasy and science fiction, because in her world those were both also considered “escapist doggerel” whereas people of quality should be reading like, Shakespeare and Dickens.
Ditto, except that my parents did care about a few things. I remember wanting to check out Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Mom vetoing it. I’m guessing it’s because of the dual-religion household, but as a kid I was certain it was because the title indicates an uncertainty of whether the deity you’re praying to is actually there to listen. (I was raised Catholic and went to a fundamentalist elementary school–the kind that uses A Beka. This gave me some…interesting views on religion for a very long time.)
My boyfriend wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons.
My mom thought the Simpsons was crude and rude and just dumb. We were not allowed to watch it (and subsequently always tried to watch it at friends houses). It’s only recently that she’s admitted is can be quite clever.
(Also on the Do Not Watch list: Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead. To be fair, they were pretty crude.)
I wasn’t allowed to read Carrie or other Stephen King books, but I checked them out from the school library. Once “On Writing” was on our AP English Lang. class reading list, my mother relented. I think she thought the violence would have been too much for me. The only books of his I regretted reading during that time were the Tommyknockers and Christine. I also read Anne Rice while at school, and remember realizing that I probably shouldn’t have been reading it at all. My sister and I also read Philippa Gregory: not the Other Boleyn Girl, but the weird incesty ones about that one made-up family and the Clan of the Cave Bear series. The school library was unusually progressive for a public school in Florida, now that I think about it. I also remember skipping through the umpteenth sex scene with Jondalar and Ayla because that was pretty much all they did.
Me too, re: Clan of the Cave Bear. I wasn’t too young to get what was going on, but I wasn’t titillated either. Once I got over that initial OMG SEX it was like, ugh, this is getting awkward, go invent something.
Tell me more about how coltsfoot makes things salty and less about dicks, please, Jean M. Auel.
My mother RECOMMENDED Clan of the Cave Bear to me when I was a 10-year-old precocious child and I don’t know whether it was because she didn’t really recall it very well herself or because she thought it would make me shut up about grownup books for a while.
My grandmother read them and was like “I like the historical background parts but I really think Ayla wouldn’t realistically have invented all of those things” and just… failed to mention all of the sex at all.
tbh my main issue with the series
My mum recommended them too when I was 11! I asked her why some years later, mentioning all the sex and mammoth sex and sex because of mammoth sex and Jondalar’s superhuman penis and she went ‘oh yeah, I forgot about that…..’
My mom recommended them when I was fourteen! I read pretty much all of them, by borrowing them from a boy in my class, whose mother had also recommended them to him.We discreetly did not discuss any of the sexy parts.
I first read The Clan of the Cave Bear series when I was in 7th grade, a time when I thought sex was a weird and gross idea. I reread it in 10th Grade and appreciated those scenes a lot more.
I read them as an adult (I must have been 27 or 28) and I found the sex scenes interesting only from an anthropological standpoint… but it makes me wonder what I would have thought of them as a teen.
In Jean Auel’s defense, I am pretty sure that 80% of my early sex education was from the Clan of the Cave Bear series, and aside from setting my expectations re: dudes (esp. Ranec) too high, it wasn’t too bad.
Yup. I definitely got most of my early sex education from those books. If my mother had known what was in them, she’d’ve flipped.
My mom had the Clan of the Cave Bears books, and I think she just… gently suggested I might not be interested? IDK, I remember looking at them and was like, for some reason no?
I don’t remember my parents ever telling me I shouldn’t read a book or not letting me read one I wanted to…they let me take “Gone with the Wind” with me to summer camp when I was 12, so I don’t think they monitored my reading that closely.
I do know that I snuck my mom’s copy of “Practical Magic” into my room at age 13 and just never gave it back. For some reason, I felt like it was a book I wasn’t supposed to read, but I read it soooo many times (it’s literally falling to pieces). I don’t think she ever even noticed it was gone.
ETA: They also allowed my little sister to buy romance novels (“The Purchased Wife” and “The Blue Viking”) when she was 12. They ended up as joke gifts for my birthday, but there were no objections as far as I can recall
ETA2: My mom let me PURCHASE “The Mists of Avalon” at age 13/14. I probably should not have been allowed to do that. I don’t think I read it all the way through until I was 16, but I was SUPER into it.
Practical magic! The only books I hid from my parents were the new age/pagan spell books that I would secretly buy at the B Dalton in the mall.
I didn’t steal my mom’s books, but I definitely snuck a number of her CDs into my collection! Lol, and they’re still some of my favorites today.
I watched the miniseries of The Mists of Avalon with my parents when I was a youngster (11 or 12) and I was a big fan of King Arthur but had somehow managed to not find out about the incest bit. I was well traumatised.
“Gone with the Wind” is the only book I remember my parents debating whether i should read when I was 11 or so. I think the ultimate decision was that I wouldn’t understand it anyway so it wouldn’t do me any harm. I also hid a lot of books though, especially the ones I thought weren’t “serious” enough.
When I was EIGHT YEARS OLD, my father BOUGHT ME A COPY of the Mists of Avalon at a used bookstore, under the theory that “it was long and would take me a while to read” (At that age I probably read about three YA-length books most days, so 1000+ page books that cost $1.25 at the used bookstore or the library were basically my two options to not bankrupt the family). He was not familiar with the content, and in his defense it had a magic lady on the cover and did indeed seem like the kind of thing I would be into.
I read it. I loved it. I definitely got that SOMETHING bad went down in the cave, but the rest of it flew over my head. When I went back and reread it around age 14, I was horrified.
My mother said Valley of the Dolls was not a suitable book for children when I saw it at a garage sale, but afterwards I found it at a house where I babysat and read it and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) while the babies were napping as well as other trashy and /or educational books my mother would have disapproved of. Baby sitting: earn money while reading trash:Highly reccommend
That’s exactly how I discovered Johanna Lindsey and formed a variety of wildly inaccurate ideas about the sexual prowess of sheikhs.
My parents had a copy of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), which they stashed at the tippy top of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our den (yeah, right, like that would prevent me from climbing up there and reading it when I was 11). I definitely read a lot of the old-school Joy of Sex from the ’70s when I was babysitting.
I am actually trying to figure out where to store my smut stash right now, as my precious and precocious darling will probably be investigating it sometime in the next decade or so.
May I suggest hiding them in plain sight with fake book jackets on boring topics?
OMG that is so genius!
It’s the only way I can think to outsmart my own childhood self, who was kind of a nosy little shit.
A copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know etc… appeared in our recycling bin (stored under the kitchen counter), when I was about 10, and I have always wondered if this was my parent’s awkward attempts to give my brother The Talk (recycling was his job), as my parents are not book discarders.
I discovered this book in my parents’ bookshelves around the age of 12 or so, and immediately pulled it out to read when the house was empty, stuffing it back in the shelf when somebody came home. It was an old and fairly homophobic edition, but some parts were hella informational.
This was also circa the age where I was devouring romance novels so I had an awareness of sex but not of the mechanics. When my parents found my stash, my dad just went, “You know these aren’t . . . real, right?” and gave the books back.
I didn’t connect these two events for YEARS.
babysitting: truly the liberal aunt that every sheltered child needs.
(ticks off things discovered while babysitting: American Pie, Avatar the Last Airbender, mainly anything on cable.)
Back in my babysitting days, the mum I used to babysit for (who is now an actual friend of mine which is amazing) was an English teacher, so their living room was just full of books – so many that they were double-stacked. I think it was just a coincidence that some of the more trashy ones were at the back rather than the front, but that was as much about them being the kind of thing you’d take on holiday and not mind if the salt water ruined the pages as they were ones that they didn’t want their girls reading.
Oh man, I wish I had been able to do that! Unfortunately for me, my babysitting clients came uniformly from my church, and if the nice young Mormon families I was babysitting for had any good trashy novels, they were kept far from the eyes of prying babysitters: it was all “Finding Faith in Christ” and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families”. On the plus side, there were pretty much always fresh baked goods and an excellent collection of Turner Classic Movies.
My mother said that about Valley of the Dolls too, but kind of half-heartedly. I read the whole thing in the bathtub when I was 14.
When I was 5 my older brother and father were discussing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at dinner, but my dad said I was too young to read it. Infuriating. So after my brother fell asleep, I stole his copy and spent the night leaning out the window so I could read it by the streetlight. When my dad came to wake me for kindergarten I was sobbing uncontrollably because Aslan was dead and nothing mattered anymore. So he let me stay home from school and read the rest of it out loud to me, and never again suggested I was too young to read a book.
That is the sweetest ending to that story.
There are some great dads in this thread.
Mine read The Hobbit to me like seven times and I never got tired of it. I still have the copy he read from on my shelf.
That is a beautiful story.
I was given The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a gift either for my 5th birthday, or as a Christmas gift that year. My dad read it out loud to me twice. Then, when I asked for him to start it again (I was 6 by then, I think), he told me that he wasn’t going to do it anymore, and that I could read it if I wanted to. I took the book from him and started reading (the way he tells it). We didn’t stop reading together until the middle of 5th grade.
My mom apparently asked my dad to read The Chronicles of Narnia out loud to her when she was pregnant with me. Nine years later before my sister was born they did it again and I joined them and that’s how I was introduced to the Chronicles of Narnia. (Before Aslan died my mom made sure to tell me “it’s going to seem like something bad happens, but it turns out OK”. I said “Like someone dies and then comes back?” and she got kind of shifty.) I’m pretty sure we made it through at least The Silver Chair.
That is really fantastic and awesome.
I got it when I was 6! Gotta loved gifted copies of this book.
Heh, yeah I’ve already started doing that sort of thing as an adult!
oh, this remind me of my father and i taking turns to read one another The Hobbit aloud over and over, it was my first “proper” book, and had delighted him as a young person, and it was just something very special to share. After a couple of years, most of the pages had fallen loose from the binding, but we still have that copy, all those years later
Aww, that is amazing! The last thing I remember reading with my dad is in 5th grade, during my very first read of The Lord of the Rings (we had listened to a Hobbit book on tape the previous summer and then I had devoured the book). I mostly read it on my own, but when I started Two Towers, my dad and I did some reading time together, and we read The White Rider chapter to each other. So I got to read Gandalf coming back with my dad! It was pretty special.
My heart just melted in to a puddle around my desk.
Your dad is awesome, which I know you know, but he deserves to hear that a random stranger on the internet thinks so too.
#parentinggoals
Love this (and your dad!)
My mom read them all to us and did voices for the characters (Edmund and Eustace were real whiners!) and I remember my Dad sneaking up behind her and melodramatically acting out the scenes and I would stifle giggles so as not to let her know (which never lasted for long.)
I often flash back to our biggest laugh during that – “Rinse on the poop.” which was Rhince (1st mate on the Dawntreader) on the poop deck.
When my dad was reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader to us, he rendered approximately the fifteenth reference to the poop deck as “the poop deck, where they kept all the toilet paper” and kept going without missing a beat.
My parents never forbid us from reading anything (they are both voracious readers themselves). They were also “early to bed” kind of people, so we were awake a lot of the time when the “grown up movies” were on, so I saw Jaws, Fawlty Towers, Major League and the like when I was pretty young. All my siblings and I now possess irreverent and dry senses of humor, which my parents count as a win, so it all worked out.
I had a similar experience of censoring my own reading: definitely returned Brave New World to the library in 6th grade because I looked up “promiscuous” and “orgy” and was like “…maybe I’ll read this when I’m older?”
I was forbidden from more television than books, as I recall. Pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to watch Boy Meets World because the show had people dating in it. (Watched it anyway.) Wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons (still don’t know why). Saved By The Bell (also no idea why).
I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons either, I assume because Bart said ‘hell’.
The weird thing is, I definitely had a Simpsons backpack in kindergarten. It was purple and had a print of Bart and Homer faces with speech bubbles, with an array of quotes including “Pardon my French” and “Come back here you little!!” (with the 2 exclamation points)
I don’t think I was old enough to be allowed to choose my own backpack, and my sister had an identical one. It’s all very confusing.
EDIT: FOUND IT! Wow… https://www.etsy.com/listing/235251637/1990s-the-…
Same here, my tv options were super limited. I know my mom nixed The Simpsons because Bart was rude (thanks, “Eat my shorts” t-shirts!), but a lot of it was because of significantly younger siblings.
My mother would ban TV shows almost entirely at random, like The Power Rangers, based on things she heard on the news, despite the fact that neither me nor either of my sisters ever expressed even the slightest interest in watching it in the first place.
There were a few books that I got Looks for reading, but I was never forbidden from any particular book. By the time I was reading things that might have been forbidden I was older and just didn’t say anything to my parents about them.
But TV, yeah, we had a bunch of things we weren’t allowed to watch. Mostly for “eastern mysticism.” I know for The Simpsons we weren’t allowed to watch it because Bart was rude to authority figures and we were young enough that my parents were concerned about the effect it would have on our attitudes.
I was also not allowed to watch The Simpsons for years, and my parents didn’t monitor my reading at all. What was it about The Simpsons that was offensive??
I have no idea! The bits that I’ve watched (still not allowed, shhh) seem to be very on the nose about whatever political situation was current at the time the episode aired… other than that I’m not sure? It’s possible that my immigrant parents didn’t want me to aspire to the kind of mediocrity that Homer seems to embody, but like, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would be “influenced” by Homer?
…I got nothin’.
What’s funny is that in my family, The Simpsons was the only show we watched. I never even watched Sesame Street or Nickelodeon, but my parents and brother and I would watch The Simpsons regularly. I think my parents must have started watching it out of curiosity, because they’d heard it was controversial.
If I remember correctly, many many parents were concerned that their kids would emulate Bart.
And yet I ended up emulating Lisa and becoming a bookish nerd with a distaste for loud boorish behaviour. (didn’t become vegetarian though)
Me neither! Of course, once I grew up and left home, they decided it was okay and started watching it every night over dinner with my little sister. They also got a microwave and cable tv. It’s quite possible that I still haven’t forgiven them.
I feel like a lot of parents (not mine) felt it was quite crude, along the same lines as South Park. (All animation is basically the same, right?)
I was basically not allowed to watch much of anything. Famously, my mother would complain if we watched too much Captain Planet because it was “anti-business”.
Also on the No list were anything with violence (power rangers etc) anything with rudeness or a rude bossy character (rugrats for the latter, animaniacs and its ilk for the former). She had a very specific vendetta against the Simpsons which apparently had something to do with an early episode she saw?? She was against shows about teens because I was not a teen (Doug, literally every sitcom style after-school show). She was against much of nickelodeon, and we when she questioned us for watching Fresh Prince I realized it was because there were so many black kids being represented in Nick shows like All That!
She had a childhood crush on Jonny Quest, so I was allowed to watch The New Adventures, though.
One of the few shows I was allowed to watch was Animaniacs… I think my parents saw that it had educational value (learning history! and science! kinda) and overlooked the rudeness!
That’s kind of fabulous that your mom’s childhood crush enabled you to watch a show when so many others were barred.
My mom looooooved Animaniacs because of all the old pop culture references. She’d be cracking up over Mae West jokes, or a “Casablanca” homage, and we’d just be befuddled.
My parents were the same way about television. Granted, part of it was because they didn’t want us to watch too much of it when we were kids. (In fact, to keep us from sitting around and watching TV all day during the summer, my mom would give us TV tickets each day that we could redeem when we chose; in spite of her many faults, this was an excellent idea).
The show my mom really hated was Rugrats and she refused to let us watch in the house. I think the animation style kind of grossed her out? I mean, I don’t care because I felt that way about it even as a kid, but that was a hard “no” for her. For the most part, she just encouraged us to watch PBS and there was so much entertaining and fun stuff on there that we didn’t care about watching other stuff.
I am grateful that they never got caught up in all the concerns that parents had about television like “the teletubbies are gay!” or “anything with magic in it is satanic!” Because that was ridiculous.
My parents were very vigilant about the television/movies I watched (I was not allowed to watch Golden Girls because it was “raunchy” (I remember this specifically because I had no idea what that word meant), nor Doogie Howser because of its adult situations, I think?), but did zero policing of my reading. I read Flowers in the Attic when I was too young to even understand the various euphemisms that referred to sex, which actually made it more appropriate for me. The poisoned doughnuts were the part that stuck with me for years, because I love mysteries. Then I re-read it later in life and was all “oh haha THAT’S what everyone is talking about with this book.”
my parents were like this too – a lot of censoring of videos/tv and absolutely no policing of books, including the Joy of Sex (next to my parent’s bed) and the Clan of the Cave Bear series (buried in the built in bookshelves in my room!). I also hung out at this English language library (grew up in Japan) and half the books were graphic romance novels and I DEVOURED them as a middle schooler. My parents didn’t censor any of my reading and I think that helped my sexual development. That being said, now that I have kids voraciously reading chapter books, I’m trying to decide whether to hide my stuff…Husband thinks they all need to be hidden away in a box in my closet and I think now that my parents may have deliberately left them out to avoid having The Talk.
Oh man, similar situation here! Parents hyper-vigilant about TV. No Golden Girls or Doogie Howser, and nothing with “magic” or “powers” either (it was during that 80s paranoia about witchcraft stealing our childrensss). But I remember reading tons of studio-era Hollywood biographies that were FULL of scandals and it’s like it just never occurred to my parents to worry about what we were reading? I also snuck romance novels from a cool older girl at my church, but I was pretty good at hiding. I was a sneaky sneaky kid.
I do remember once my mother reading The Horse Whisperer and paper-clipping together the pages with sex scenes, giving me the book to read, and saying that she trusted me not to read those parts. I obviously totally did. They were not sexy.
Well, she might as well have drawn an arrow with flashing lights that said, “read these parts!” My grandma shared a romance novel with me once and included a post-it note that said something like, “Watch out for pages 57, 94, and 173.” Which were obviously the sex scenes and which I obviously turned to as soon as I was out of her sight. I was in my early-20s at this point.
Maybe what she was actually doing was helping you find the good bits first?
Same–for me as a kid, it was pretty much PBS or nothing (I got to watch Nick/Cartoon Network at grandma’s though), but since I read voraciously, not much book censoring. I do remember that weirdly, my mom wouldn’t let me read the 4th Harry Potter book as a 10-year old, probably for adult situations/death. But that was out of the ordinary, and I read things like Mists of Avalon all the time without her noticing.
ha! yes my parents were like that, too – I remember getting into big trouble for watching fight club when it first came out on video when I was a senior in highschool but yet – nary a book censor in sight.
I remember reading alllll of their old natgeos/readers digest magazines (why did they keep so many years worth?) when I was a tiny wee inkwash, the joy of sex, some terrifying mary higgins clark novel about a girl who is kidnapped and develops multiple personality disorder – which, btw, completely fucked me up age 9- … but I never read clan of the cave bear , mostly because I just thought it sounded kinda boring. 😉
My parents were super vigilant about tv/movies too! I mentioned upthread that I wasn’t allowed to watch Ren and Stimpy because it was too gross or something. I think that it would have just been too much effort to censor my reading, thank god.
Books my parents didn’t balk at: everything Stephen King ever wrote, Jaws, Dracula, all of my granny’s paper-bag books (the Harlequins she kept in paper grocery bags next to her bed), The Sex Adventures of Ayla and Jondalar.
Books my parents made me wait a couple of years to read: A Time To Kill.
Ahahah, my mother ENCOURAGED me to read The Sex Adventures of Ayla and Jondalar. I was not too young, but I was too Ace. But all the prehistory stuff was cool!
I tried to read A Time to Kill when I was maybe 12 – I had read The Firm and The Client, I think – and didn’t get far. That opening scene was a lot to process for a fairly sheltered 7th grader.
I remember reading A Time to Kill in…I think it was middle school? I’d stolen my mother’s copy of “The Runaway Jury” about a year before, and was working my way through all the John Grisham books (even the cruddy ones about baseball).
My parents never banned me from reading anything, which is good because I don’t need more reasons to resent them, but they were hella judge about everything I read. Everything. If it was too “fluffy” I was wasting my potential and if it was too “smart” I was trying to show off.
This, a thousand times this. They reserved their ire for the “fluffy”, though–nothing was too smart.
Ugggh that sounds like the worst
It was. And they complain to this day that I don’t want to share what I’m reading/writing with them.
read The Clan of the Cave Bears and sequels in sixth or seventh grade with out letting my parents know. That was some kind of porn. For that age.
Freshman English class, Clan of the Cave Bear was required reading. I still don’t know what was up with that.
Same and still scarred (but better informed for it-ish)
My mother *handed me* Flowers in the Attic at age 11. It was … as bewildering as you could imagine.
I remember being obsessed with Flowers in the Attic as a grade school kid, and so many other girls were too! Like… what? why? how?
My friends and I all read that in sixth or seventh grade and I guess our overly invested teachers had no idea what it was about, because they let us, but when they saw us passing around Forever a few weeks later, they told our parents (who did not care). We all found it pretty funny that they objected to the book where someone was having safe sex with a person who wasn’t her brother. “It’s a total upgrade, morally!”
Oh. I wasn’t forbidden, but I wish I had been… when I was about 12 or 13, a friend came over and read out loud to me a scene of a snuff film. I didn’t even know what that was, but it upset me deeply for a long time. I did get some comfort from that Karate Kid song: “I am a MAN who will FIGHT for your HOOOOONOOOOR.” I figured not all man could be all bad if there was a song like that. But I didn’t date until college…
But I did recently tell my elementary-aged kids that they’re not allowed to take out graphic novels from the “teen” section of the public library.
They put Saga and The Sandman in the YA graphic novel section at my library (but not, say, Fun Home, which is in the regular graphic novel section), and even my very permissive eyebrows were kinda raised. I enjoy them all, but I would reverse the placing of those examples, probably.
My local library puts almost all graphic novels in the YA section, including the one Sandman volume they have. I’m pretty okay with it now that they moved the YA section, but when I was working my way through Sandman, it was still housed basically right next to the children’s picture books and I wasn’t okay with that. Regular novels there, not a problem, but images are different.
Holy crap, Saga?? I’m 31 years old, and as much as I love the storyline of Saga, I have seriously considered giving it up on account of all the sex and gore.
I… holy fuck. That’s so scarring. Why did your friend do that?
I dunno – jerk move, right? I don’t think we remained friends.
I definitely read LOTS of books that were age-inappropriate, but my Very Religious parents were surprisingly disinterested in policing my reading habits? Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High are the only ones I can remember being actively discouraged, though they were unhappy when I got into Harry Potter (not that that stopped me, and they eventually stopped caring so much).
Oh snap, I just remembered picking Lady Chatterley’s Lover up and my mom being like NOPE. But I can’t think of any other books she did that for, so.
Also, my brother gave me Brave New World to read when I was 12, and the only thing I couldn’t figure out is why they kept referring to various women as “pneumatic.” He declined to explain that one to me.
I started reading Harry Potter when I was 18. I think the first two or three had been published. My mother wasn’t happy but couldn’t really forbid it. She made a bunch of comments about witchcraft and told me not to loan them to my sister. She got over it and even bought me a hardcover of the first one when she noticed it was the only one I had in paperback.
This seems like a trend. I too had very religious parents who basically let me read whatever. The only time they ever said not to read a book was when it was something THEY had read that had a sexy bit in it. (I remember this including Snow Falling on Cedars and The Horse Whisperer.) But otherwise, man, they let us loose.
I can’t recall my parents outright banning any books, but I do very much remember that some books were considered “trash” or “nonsense.” Romance novels fell firmly into that category (though I was less interested in those, so it wasn’t really an issue). Fantasy was largely in that category, even though the Lord of the Rings books were some of the few my mother owned, and my parents often bought us copies of Harry Potter as soon as they were out. Comics were definitely “trash.” I have many memories of my mother seeing that I was reading a sword and sorcery type book (see: all of my Dragonlance novels) and commenting “why are you reading that nonsense?” (Because Raistlin Majere. And dragons.)
My mother, bless her, actively encouraged me to read Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, because dragons.
(In retrospect, I got some pretty terrible subconscious lessons about sex from those books, but dragons.)
My mother’s friend gave me her copy of Dragonsdawn when I was roughly middle school aged (because I liked reading and dragons).
It felt kinda illicit to read the sex stuff, and even more so knowing that my MOM’S FRIEND had read them too. I found the framing of the sex stuff in a pre-destiny way a bit off-putting though (I remember being skeeved by Sallah and Tarvi), and I don’t think I read beyond that first one. But I don’t actually think 12-13 is too young for sex in books; sex ed was definitely a thing in middle school, and kids my age were definitely at least telling each other they were having sex. I just wish I’d been exposed to books with better lessons about sexuality and healthy relationships.
Dragonsdawn is not so bad by Pern standards, but there’s some seriously skeevy stuff in the earlier books about consent and the lack thereof when dragons or fire lizards mate and their riders/owners end up getting dragged along emotionally and sexually. It’s very similar to a lot of awful ’70s rape fantasy romance fiction, which makes sense given when McCaffrey wrote the earlier novels. I also wish I’d gotten some better lessons about sex and sexuality, especially because I spent so much time reading all of those books and hoovering up notions about Sex is Okay if You Don’t Have the Capacity to Say Yes Because Then You Aren’t To Blame.
Yeah, romance novels were out at our house, too. Comics were out only because my mom did not like going to the comics store; once we were old enough to buy them ourselves (particularly TPBs and graphic novels at Barnes & Noble), she didn’t really care.
I had a definite *thing* for many characters in my Dragonlance novels. I started reading them in about 6th grade and my parents were VERY against anything witchcraft or occult and I hid those damn novels in the bottom of my nightstand drawer for years. I bought them at garage sales that my BFF and I walked to on the weekends. But yeah. Raistlin and dragons and all of them. I don’t know when I started reading them unabashedly, but I remember it being a non-event and my parents being like “whatever. at least you’re reading.” and feeling like all of those years of hiding Dragonlance books were wasted.
I was forbidden to read the “Starship Titanic” book. And also my dad didn’t want me reading “Callahan’s Lady” and “Lady Slings the Booze” by Spider Robinson, when I was allowed to read other books by Spider Robinson. (Both of those books are set entirely in a brothel, so I can see his point.”
In terms of books I should not have read, I read Firestarter by Stephen King in 7th grade and it is probably the only book I wish someone had stopped me from reading.
Also I think my mother gave me “The Dragon Queen” by Alice Borchardt which turned out to have some weird sex shit in it that she cannot possibly have been aware of.
I was also permanently scarred by Firestarter! Read it in middle school, wished the school librarian had been paying better attention, had bad dreams for weeks. *shiver*
My parents never banned any books, and I pretty much read whatever I wanted. My dad caught me reading Harry Potter fanfiction once and I did get in trouble for that, though.
Same here, I only ever got in trouble for reading fanfiction.
Matilda. My mom wasn’t too aware of this book or Roald Dahl, but then the movie came out. And there is a lot of child abuse, and my mom decided she didn’t want me to be exposed to that. So suddenly I was forbidden from this book and all of Roald Dahl (though I had already read The BFG by then). I don’t know how much research she ended up doing, because the more I learn about Roald Dahl, the more I can understand not wanting to expose your kid to him. But this was also the only book she ever forbade me to read.
My dad, on the other hand, had a habit of deciding my brother and I needed to experience something and then changing his mind halfway through. So he was reading Huck Finn to us, a chapter a night, until he abruptly decided that it wasn’t appropriate for children and we weren’t allowed to finish it. I think he mostly didn’t want to have uncomfortable conversations with us. But then the book was assigned to me in school two years later, so I read it anyway.
After that, I mostly managed to finish books before he changed his mind, but that ended up being worse. I was 11 when I first read Doctor Zhivago (my teacher wouldn’t let me give my oral book report) and 12 when I experienced The Bridge on the Drina (at one point, it takes 20 pages to impale a dude). So then I just started ignoring him completely when it came to books.
Oh, lord, I didn’t know Roald Dahl had written Adult stories, and got very excited when I found “My Uncle Oswald” near the Agatha Christies in the library. That was an eye-opener.
HAH! I remember that very same eye-opening.
I could never read Huck Finn aloud. What do you do when you get to all the “n-words”?
Yeah, I think that’s why my dad stopped reading it.
I say fellas. Like “He’s one of us, he’s a good fella.” Worked for my baby brother!
Had a teacher in fourth grade read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry out loud to us, and when she got to the n-word (there is one!), she actually went for it and said the word. I think about half of us (I was in that half) had never heard that word and had no idea it was bad. The other half were kind of shocked and gasped. She just very matter-of-factly said, “That’s what people called them,” and went right on reading. I guess that approach worked. But I don’t know that I’d be able to do it myself, at least not without having a Serious Conversation beforehand.
My mom haaaaated Roald Dahl. Never oturight banned him but she took a lot of umbridge with how everything was either “creepy” or “nonsense” and how all the parents sucked/were dead. She had a big problem with “dead parent” trope in general, which I get.
My mom also hated Dahl and “anything with Helena Bonham-Carter” because of “creepy” and “nonsense” reasons!
Oh please. Dahl is hilarious. In “George’s Marvelous Medicine,” George’s very evil grandmother has “a mouth like a dog’s bottom.” I cannot wait until my kids are old enough to read this stuff and laugh as hard at it as I did.
Yeah, Bridge on the Drina is some next level torture.
i do not understand why an adult would forbid a child to read Roald Dahl stories. The kid friendly ones are absolutely great at that age, I’ve always thought that if I ever have kids I’m giving them those books. I read The Witches, Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory far too many times. I also bought a collection of horror stories by him that were definitely disturbing (guy that can hear the screeches of trees when they are being cut down, guy with a beautiful tattoo on the back that sells his skin/gets it torn from him), which was a little weird coming from the creator of magical, warm stories. I was still fascinated by that book, and fortunately I’ve never been squeamish.
The only book I was forbidden to read was Wifey, which is strange given that Clan of the Cave Bears and Fear of Flying and my dad’s not-well-hidden Playboy collection (which, okay, we would have been forbidden if they’d known we found them) were all right there, available to all us latch-key kids whenever we wanted them.
(Since I was law-abiding, I didn’t read it. Well, I didn’t read more than the first couple of chapters, because I needed to know why it was forbidden.)
Clan of the Cave Bear! My mom gave me this book to read when I was 12 because she loved it. I actually did a book report on one of the sequels (The Mammoth Hunters) a year later.
Yeah, my parents never monitored what I read as a kid.
Ha! I mentioned Wifey up above – only difference was that I read it because it was on the shelf and BOY was I too young for that.
My parents never forbid me from reading anything, but my 7th grade English teacher once refused to let me write a book report on a Piers Anthony book, because of the adult content. My mom likened the book to Clan of the Cave Bear, which I’d never read, and I somehow thought the comparison would change my teacher’s mind. It did not.
Oh man, I would have LOVED to hear that conversation
Man, I remember DOING a book report on Clan of the Cave Bear, it was on the list of books you could choose from. None of the sequels were, of course. Because rape is ok to read about in seventh grade, but not sexy sex!
We got to watch the movie (outside class) for art history extra credit, and we still laugh about it, as we would always turn Art History Extra Credit Movies into extra weekend hangout times and my friends, who had not read it, were not prepared for nekkid Darryl Hannah and subtitle caveman talk.
I *did* a 7th grade book report on a Piers Anthony book… I just found the file on my computer (how do I still have this??), but I’m afraid to open it. 😮
OPEN IT
FOR SCIENCE
Piers Anthony! I was all about the Xanth books in fifth and sixth grade. He responded to a letter I wrote him and I showed it to my teacher and was crushed when she had no idea who he was.
There is a really great episode of This American Life about a young man who ran away from home to go live with Piers Anthony… here it is: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/ep… it’s a great episode all around
I did a book report on Carnivores of Light and Darkness in middle school! Why, hawthorn, why?
Oh my god I remember loving that book… Alan Dean Foster, right? I think it was the first book I ever read with a POC main character and that deconstructed the princess-that-must-be-rescued storyline.
I’m shocked at how many Piers Anthony books I read in middle school; especially the Incarnations of Immortality series, which involved some bizarre endorsements of e.g. pedophilia? All checked out from the school library, so, thanks guys, I guess.
When I was maybe eleven or twelve, my paternal grandmother gave my mom Clan of the Cave Bear (which is super weird in and of itself), and she gave it to me without reading it. Which is how I got through book four of that porny, porny series before she realized they were absolutely not appropriate for a kid of my age. What I remember most is (a) the first book is actually not sexy at all and just full of sexual violence and I have no idea why I kept reading them, and (b) by book three, even eleven-year-old me realized these books were long, largely plotless, and boring, and I should just skip ahead to the parts where Ayla and what’s his name bang (also that Ayla really needed some feminism in her life).
Jondalar!
I believe Ayla eventually invents feminism. And monogamy. And everything else.
Diagnosing illness, the concept of fatherhood, sewing, cunnilingus. bras, animal husbandry, starting fires with flint, and stitching wounds. To name a few.
And blowjobs! I’m pretty sure she invents blowjobs!
If you just think “what are things that we think of as cavemen stuff”, Ayla invented it. (On those rare occasions she didn’t invent it — bleaching leather with pee and chalk, offhand — she perfected it.)
Petition to replace the term “Mary Sue” with “Ayla?”
At least, it’s what pops into my head any time I see a too talented to be true character, especially in historical fiction.
Ayla never bothered me, though, because she was “chosen” by the Cave Lion and the Earth Mother. She came by her superpowers honestly.
Ayla has to invent monogamy to placate her violently jealous True Love.
This is why my favorite book in the series is Valley of Horses, skip all the parts with Jondalar.
Eventually, she invents the patriarchy. Not even making this up. JEAN AUEL HOW COULD YOU.
I’m still mad about this. Like, that whole story line about Jondalar was just abysmal. You went through all this stuff together and you can’t wait for a year while you don’t have 100% of her attention? And everyone is like, oh those two kids, they just need to stick together! No! Clearly Ayla needs to ditch him and invent lesbianism or something!
When I was in second grade, my grandmother gave me Clan of the Cave Bear DIRECTLY. I am fairly certain she hadn’t read it herself, but I was in the middle of a surviving-in-the-wilderness phase (Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, etc.) and I think she made some assumptions.
I remember reading it at school and getting some HARD side-eye from teachers, though.
Hell, my little sister wrote a book report on Clan of the Cave Bear. I am beginning to think that I was born in a porn-loving barn ;-).
You want grandparents giving you crap? My grandfather gave me Skye O’Malley. Which is one of the eighties romance novels that started the whole “let’s have a lot of very graphic sex” trend, and oh lord it was something. LOTS of rape, lots of graphic sex, weird Orientalist shit involving being trapped the Ottoman Empire. I’m pretty darn sure he passed it on, unread, when one of the church ladies gave it to him (my grandfather was an eligible widower, who did read historical romance, but preferred westerns. Those ladies were tryin’ to get his attention).
I do a lot of thrifting for my eBay book business, and the BEST place to buy porn is church sales, especially Baptists.
Every copy of Lolita (a perennial bestseller) I ever found was at a Baptist rummage sale.
I was five, The Valley of Horses was at a tag sale, my mother loved tag sales, I loved horses.
I still remember my kindergarten teacher chasing my mother down when she came to pick me up one day, warning her that I had gotten my little mitts on a book that was Not Appropriate. My mom completely shrugged this off.
(It’s possible she was trying to level the score with my father, who had recently told the school principal “The first step is admitting you have a problem” in a conversation about why all students had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.)
I found Clan of the Cave Bear on a bookshelf at my aunt and uncle’s house when I was maybe nine or so and read it. I was enthralled and found out there were sequels so I asked my mom to buy me the second one, which she did because she didn’t know any better. I was… not expecting all the sexiness, but it was certainly formative! I think when my mom was buying me the fourth book in the series, the cashier said something to her about them and my mom was like, “Oh, my daughter likes them.” And the cashier was like, “omg you know those are pornography right?!” My mom had not known this. But at that point she figured I had already read three of them so what was another?
My mom was pretty cool.
lol, I found Plains of Passage sitting around the house when I was 9 or so, and it was eye-opening for sure! I then went back and read the first ones, but I think it might have been a better order to be introduced to the sex parts (especially at 9) because whatever might be said about the sex in Plains of Passage, at least it was clearly consensual.
Same, except I read (then gave up and skimmed to the sex parts) my mom’s copies. I was too young!
Grendel …age nine
I’d read through my mother’s Dickens and Poe and Shakespeare and for some reason I decided my next conquest would be Grendel. My mother swooped in out of nowhere, took it from me and, when I asked why I couldn’t read it, said that I had to read Beowulf first. She didn’t have it and I didn’t really do public libraries at the time (we moved too often for me to ever stay long enough to get a library card) so I resigned myself to waiting. Cut to the first day of sixth grade and middle school, two years and three moves later. We’re touring the school and swing by the library. Guess what’s sitting on the shelf in the poetry section. Checked it out within ten minutes, finished it that night, then read Grendel the next day.
I honestly can’t think of anything else that I was expressly forbidden from reading. My parents and grandparents (I lived with both) had large libraries and I could browse at my leisure. Between Clan of the Cave Bear, some iffy horror novels and a lot of Mary Renault middle school me had some interesting ideas about sex. And that was before I’d discovered fanfiction…
HOWEVER. When I got into comics in seventh grade I do remember hiding my copies of Hellboy from my mother because I was convinced she’d think I was devil worshipping. Little did I know that when I was at school she was taking them out and reading them herself. She adores Hellboy to this day and had my father take her to the first movie as a romantic film after a big, fancy night out.
I love the story of your mom and Hellboy so much.
I just love the idea of her going into my thirteen year old bedroom, fishing the graphic novels out from under the mattress or wherever I was keeping them, and sitting down with a coffee to read them while my baby brother watches Sesame Street in the next room. Abe Sapien is still her favorite.
Oh, what a wonderful thing to do, let you keep your secret reading. Thanks, BHNH Mom!
I didn’t find out that she did that until I was a sophomore in high school. I was mortified. She was admirably blase.
delicious role reversal!
The Nibelung Saga, age probably seven. You know, ending with everyone getting slaughtered by their in-laws, and the rest getting locked up in the hall and burned to death? No idea why my parents thought that was ok reading. But they also never, ever forbid us a book, and my Mom once explained that we wouldn’t have understood the inappropriate stuff anyway.
Computer games, on the other hand, were heavily monitored by our father, so we simply went to our friend’s house to play Doom et al.
I absolutely love that you got your mom hooked on Hellboy accidentally.
I could read all the gore and sex etc that I wanted as long as it was mythology, history or ‘culture.’ But damn I could go on for days about the shows and movies and games I wasn’t allowed. All videogames. All of them. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Power Rangers. Sailor Moon. Anastasia. And very nearly Pocahontas.
I learned quite a bit from my grandfather’s Mary Renault novels.
I’m still not sure which grandparent was the one reading all the Renault and I kind of like it that way. The mystery adds something to it. They both have such eclectic tastes that it could have been either of them.
Grandma enjoys Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, thrillers, alternate histories and bodic rippers. Grandpa reads Horatio Hornblower, medical journals and turn of the century girl’s ya. (He also really enjoys movies like Clueless and The Prince and Me.)
Dear God, your grandparents sound adorable.
My grandfather liked The Prince and Me so much that he rented all of its crappy sequels just so he could see what happens next. He is a fairly young (for a grandfather), well-educated, still practicing oncologist. Watching truly terrible tween girl targeted movies in his time off. When not reading biographies of Grant or obscure Polish politicians.
Mary Renault was stocked in my high school library, and it was my first exposure to fully fleshed out gay characters in literature. Thank you, anonymously cool librarian!
My best friend and I read so many of the Virginia Andrews books when we were 12-13, we were obsessed with them. There’s a formulaic fucked up-ness, particularly to the multi-part series, and we would make a game out of it (WILL the heroine sleep with that cute guy at school who turns out to be her half brother??? the answer is yes of course). My mom is a librarian so I have no idea why I was allowed to read these – they’re a pretty weird introduction to sexual themes for a 12 year old.
I remember my friend wasn’t allowed to read Christiane F., but my dad specifically made me read it to keep me off drugs. That book is horrifying for a preteen. It has also successfully kept me off drugs until present day.
When I learned much later in life that many V.C. Andrews books were ghostwritten (at this point, I believe more have been authored by the ghostwriter than by the original author), it all made perfect sense.
This really shouldn’t have shocked me, because obvs, and yet I gasped when I learned this. By which I mean, right now…
I always wondered if maybe kids were allowed to read V.C. Andrews books because the sex in them was always HIGHLY unappealing. I’m just imagining a bunch of 12-year olds reading her descriptions of sex and thinking “Well, I want no part of this.”
That was 100% my reaction to Flowers in the Attic.
My mom took away “The Eyes of the Dragon,” Stephen King. In retrospect, that would have been an excellent starter-King book. “It,” not so much.
My 6th grade teacher gave me that book as a reward for memorizing the entirety of the midnight ride of Paul revere. She said that her niece had recompense it but there is a very graphic description of a naked old man with in the first 10 pages and I didn’t know what to do with that.
Yes! Eyes of the Dragon was the first Stephen King book I was allowed to read. My dad would vet them first; he was a voracious reader, too, so it worked out well for all involved.
That was my starter Stephen King book in sixth grade. (The school library had it. It had the word dragon on the cover. That was all the reason I needed.) Didn’t read any more King until junior year of high school and in retrospect that was probably best.
“The Eyes of the Dragon” was my first Stephen King book, I think my dad read it out loud to us when I was in 5th grade, so I was like 11. It was a good starter-King book! I didn’t read anything else of his until I was in high school though. My parents didn’t really censor my reading, and my dad probably would have let me read other King books if I had specifically asked to borrow them.
We read ‘The Eyes of the Dragon’ in eighth grade English, and then wrote and performed a play based on it. Biggest memory from that is everyone in the play firmly stating ‘Regicide!’ in the scene immediately after the king was killed – including the king (he lifted his head out of the bowl of soup it fell into). It was a good play.
That sounds awesome. My mind is a little blown by all the people who read it in school!
I read that book in sixth or seventh grade.
The one Stephen King book my mom didn’t want me to read was “Gerald’s Game.” Otherwise, I don’t recall being forbidden to read certain books.
I had the opposite. My mom loved encouraging me to keep reading at higher grade levels, rather than “backtracking” to kiddie books. So one time when I was in 6th(?) grade she pulled a book off one of the teen reading list tables at the bookstore for me: “Like Water for Chocolate.” She hadn’t read it, but she thought it looked nice. Flash forward to me sitting on the couch one evening, surrounded by family, and my face ERUPTING in blushing embarrassment because there is SEXY SEX and NUDITY and HORNY WOMEN in this book oh my GOSH! I read that book multiple times, all while trying to pull off the casual demeanor of “I’m totally chill and this is totally not a sexy book, you guys.”
My mom, on the other hand, WAS forbidden certain books by her father, one of which was “The Godfather.” I’m still convinced that part of her love for the movies is rooted in spite.
Oh my gosh. My experience with ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ came much later, but I also had this experience reading that book.
Nothing could’ve prepared kid-me for the scene with Gertrudis in the outdoor shower. Too hot, hot damn.
I was an obnoxiously precocious five year old who took great pleasure in showing off my reading skills, and when my mom left her copy sitting out I made it through an entire chapter before she found me and learned to do a better job hiding things, and then for some reason she gave me a copy for Christmas when I was twelve? Which is weird considering my parents’ massive towering fear of me ever doing sex things.
Anyway, I read it and learned Things.
My parents had a couple of dirty limerick and sex books that they kept in their dresser that I think they’re probably still convinced I never got into. In reality, I found them and had zero interest whatsoever (other than a vague embarrassed “ew my parents have sex”).
Meanwhile, after I finished “Like Water for Chocolate” my mom was like “You should read ‘Reckless Appetites’!”
I wasnt as much forbidden to read books but rather operated as a censor.
Okay so I bought my first ~sexy~ book at a school yard sale for fifty cents, The Liar by Stephen Fry. After that I was allowed to read any book in the library and decide which ones were *for eighth graders only*. This basically consisted of me, an 80 pound eighth grader carrying around Jilly Cooper esque books, the “Alice” series, a nonfiction book about the KKK, and a Birds and the Bees style book everywhere I went.
I was a sight to see.
I should also mention that my tv viewing habits were absolutely limited to PBS. That’s it. Nickelodeon if my mother was in the room at the time. No Cartoon Network, no Disney Channel. I basically lived by the I Love Lucy box set I got for my tenth birthday.
I was a PBS only kid too! But a little less from the parental control standpoint and a little more from the “We don’t want to pay for cable, and the only channels that come in clearly are the two PBS affiliates and three Spanish language ones,” (although I’m sure the lack of Disney Channel exposure was an added bonus). Honestly though, the only negative result was that now I have zero tolerance for commercials on television; I view my extensive knowledge of all the TV versions of the greatest hits of British nineteenth century novels as a bonus. (BLEAK HOUSE! So good! And the BBC version of “The Way We Live Now,” with David Suchet! I bonded with a friend in college over our shared love/hate of Trollope adaptations.)
PBS kid solidarity! I don’t think it was the worst thing, but it does make this 90s pop culture nostalgia thing a little rough for me. We didn’t have cable, so I never saw Boy Meets World, or Pokemon, or Full House, ok??
I was limited to PBS until about junior high. There was some interesting stuff on there at night in the late ’80s/early ’90s.
Omg, witness the joy of ESL parents. When I was about 11, my mum found Flowers in the Attic in a charity shop and was delighted because it was the first book she had ever read in English on her own (in her late teens). She bought it for me without a second thought. Oh lordy. I had about the same reaction as Mallory. BUT, I was categorically NOT allowed to read Andrea Ashworth’s excellent memoir Once in a House on Fire, which did not stop me rooting through my mum’s cupboard to dig it out and devour it. And my dad took away my younger brother’s Darren Sin books (fantasy hell/vampire stuff, if I remember correctly). That aside, we could read more or less whatever we fancied.
Oh, I loved Once in a House on Fire! Horribly depressing, but great.
My parents didn’t censor my reading at all to my knowledge, but I definitely knew I shouldn’t be sneaking reads of the, like, two steamy novels in the house [THAT I KNOW OF]. One was Clan of the Cave Bear and the other I think was called Shibumi? I’m scared to google it now, I’m at work…
I read Gone With The Wind like 700 times as a youngster. Obviously no one in my family saw why that would be a problem. (It also didn’t help that my schools all taught the Civil War as being about “states rights” and didn’t get into the real causes.) Sadly I can’t get over my love for parts of it. I think it’s the descriptions of all the dresses? Sorry, this comment took a weird and self-confessional turn.
My mom HANDED ME Clan of the Cave Bear. PUT IT IN MY HANDS, I SWEAR TO GOD. I wasn’t tiny–I was like, 12 probably, and my mom is a Cool Mom (actually she is quite cool) who has always been pretty willing to talk, albeit sometimes over her own discomfort, about sex and feelings–but I feel like she can’t have read that book in a LONG time when she handed it over to a twelve-year-old.
(For the record, Clan of the Cave Bear is actually the violent one. The sequels are the Sooper Consensually Sexy ones, and I absolutely devoured them, and laughed about them with my friends, and then devoured them some more.)
My parents *loved* Shibumi and couldn’t wait for me to read it. I did a book project on it for school when I was about 16.
OMG. Shibumi. My Honors English teacher assigned it and I loved it. (Author, Eric VanLustbader – how can you not love a name like that?) Shibumi…about the Zen assassin who can kill you with a straw AND make you orgasm multiple times. Holy crap, I can’t believe that book got past any kind of review process. *snort*
And yet there are schools that don’t allow Catcher in the Rye for … reasons?
In a weird reversal of censorship, my mother read Catcher in the Rye FOR me when we were assigned it in class
I am now picturing your mom as Linda Belcher.
Oh yeah, I read Gone With The Wind a ton and even in high school I didn’t really appreciate just racist and awful it is. I definitely thought I did, and I definitely did not. So I also still love parts of it, particularly that part where all the wives are arguing about exactly how much to desecrate the local unmarked graves of the Union soldiers and then Melanie gives this impassioned speech that convinces them all to lovingly tend the graves and put flowers on them once a week. Pretty much every part with Melanie, actually.
Yeah, definitely Melanie. And the relationship between Scarlett and Melanie. And between Scarlett and Ellen, too. If you ignore that it’s a horribly racist book it’s a very good study of female relationships. [Edited to add: Not that you SHOULD ignore the fact that it’s a horribly racist book that totally downplays the horrors of slavery. Because you shouldn’t.]
“Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade”, because I was only in 3rd grade. And Mary Higgins Clark, which I snuck. I tried to make the case that since she was our very nice neighbor’s cousin it had to be okay, but I was overruled.
I LOVED Mary Higgins Clark in elementary school. I am still kind of jealous you’re, like, two degrees of separation from the woman who inspired me to make kidnapping escape plans.
Me too! Also, when I went to France when I was fifteen, I felt super-competent for being able to read Mary Higgins Clark in French AND identify the murderer.
And I associate them with my nana, since I swiped them from her in the first place.
Sounds fair to me.
I think when I was like 11 or 12, I checked one of the Gossip Girl books out of the library and my mom found it and was displeased, but that was about the only time she ever paid close attention to what I’d gotten from the library.
Plus, soon after that I realized if there was anything I wanted to read that I didn’t want my parents catching me reading, I could just wait until I visited my grandparents during the summer because they would just drop me off at the nearby Barnes & Noble where I could sit and read whatever for hours.
My parents dropped me off at the bookstore at the mall all the time. I stayed there reading for hours while they shopped. This is how I read so many books that weren’t appropriate for my age, like Story of O when I was 15.
I was allowed to read anything I wanted (though until I was about 10 my parents tried to keep me away from more adult movies — Dirty Dancing, which I saw anyhow at a religious friend’s house, is the only one I remember). I believe she insisted to the librarians that I be allowed into the adult section of the library even when I wasn’t just looking for her, and it took me years to get past my resentment when they stopped enforcing it. If indeed I am past it at all.
My grandmother gave me Flowers in the Attic, starting me off on a 10 year journey through that dreck (which I loved even knowing it was bad).
My mom insisted I get into the adult section of the library too! Of course I needed to be able to read the Madeleine L’Engle books that were shelved there too.
Continuing the vein of books parents should have forbidden….Terry Goodkind’s “Wizard’s First Rule.” My 14 year old child of a baptist pastor self was NOT ready for BDSM subplots.
Of course, I figured out I shouldn’t have been reading Terry Goodkind for lots of other reasons later, but that was the first one that stuck.
And of course parents never took those away, because they looked so innocent. I’m pretty sure I read a few of those far too young, thankfully too young to get anything beyond “I was promised a fun wizard quest where is my fun wizard quest :(“
Yeah, I was in full-blown Wheel of Time adulation mode and figured that since this had a similar cover and was a similar length, it would be a similar book. Um, nope.
I was introduced to them when I was 15 by the parent of kids I babysat for. It didn’t occur to me that the BDSM stuff was BDSM until later… I still haven’t finished the series 12 years later. Got bored at the 5th? book.
Oh yes, those are in the category of “books that I now realize are objectively terrible” I think I got through 3 or 4 of them before the “what the fuck is this even” bar became too high.
Book 5-ish for me.
Went back maybe a decade later and sped-read the next few just to get some closure. It was…probably not worth even the effort of checking them out from the library
My breaking point was the book that was entirely about two brand new characters. Richard and Kahlan show up on the last page.
But yeah, I should have stopped way before that.
That one actually ended up being my favorite book. My breaking point came 2 books later when Kahlan mysteriously disappeared and no one could even remember her existing.
I think that was the first time I stayed up all night to read a book and it was entirely because of Richard and Denna. Man, I inhaled those books my freshman year of high school. And my mom indulged me by buying me a rather nice set of the ones that were out by then (up to the 6th or 7th). I still can’t quite bring myself to get rid of them, as horrible as they are in retrospect.
My parents never forbade me from any books (my dad doesn’t really read and I don’t think would have known what to even look for, my mom is a lifelong bookworm and would give us any book we wanted.) But even though mom was quite liberal about what we could read I developed this really secretive habit of never telling her about anything I was reading, leading to her now thinking I only read highly intellectual literature and nonfiction for some reason.
My parents are more TV/movie people, so I was banned from a lot of those, but never books. I do remember stealing/sneaking my mother’s and aunt’s Mills & Boon and Harlequin books though, and the scandal one girl caused reading VC Andrews at school.
My parents also disapproved of me reading Harlequins, with the result that I didn’t get my paws on one til I could drive and hide it in the glove box of the car that my parents didna drive. I must say I was terribly underwhelmed 😉
Man, I got so yelled at anytime my dad heard swearing in my music (he was one of those people who’s nearly incapable of hearing lyrics, so SNEAKY f-bombs were okay), and grilled about R-rated movies, but books were unsupervised. The library had a 25-cent paperback shelf and my pocket change got me Stephen King, John Irving, and of course Flowers in the Attic for my 8th or 9th grade reading. I read and re-read Misery and Hotel New Hampshire so you’d think Flowers would have been right up my depraved little alley, but I never got past the first chapter.
Oh man, one time we were in the car and I had my iPod on shuffle. Sublime’s “Wrong Way” came on and my dad got mad at me for listening to that kind of music. So I hit next, and it ended up being The Police’s “Roxanne”. My dad leaned back all satisfied and goes, “see? this is good music”. To which I responded “they’re the same song” and that rocked his world a little. He still gets mad about “rap” music, but he has no clear idea of what rap music actually is.
THEY’RE THE SAME SONG!
Sublime got me in trouble a couple of times. They’re just rap-proximate enough to enrage a Dad.
One time I got in my car with my dad, turned it on, and Mindless Self Indulgence instantly started playing VERY LOUDLY. I quickly shut it off and he replied with “that’s some interesting music you’re listening too…”
My mom once complained that music today was “too sexy” and then AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long” came on the radio. “See,” she said “you don’t have to be dirty to be catchy!”
“These are the people who sing the Ball song.” said I
“Everything in this is about sex.” Said my dad.
My parents thought I was prissy about swearing until they came home and I was doing chores – blasting Guns n Roses and signing along.
My mom let me listen to Tori Amos in the car because my mom didn’t understand the words Tori Amos was stretching out. That I repeatedly got “starfucker just like my daddy” past Censor Mom, who once got into a physical struggle with me trying to take away a Geraldine Fibbers CD (I won) was a miracle.
So…books that you did not allow yourself to read?
My dad taped together the sex scene in 1984. I untaped it, read it, was terribly disappointed, and taped it back.
I spent a lot of time as a child looking through books to determine what category they should go in, according to the categorization system I devised for our home library (better than Dewey!). My mom got suspicious when I mostly seemed to be “looking through” Clan of the Cave Bear, and told me I had looked through it enough to know what category it went it. As an adult, I can only imagine sex with a mammoth watching you is even worse than sex with a cat watching you.
I thought I found Peak Toast in the comments yesterday, but no, this is Peak Toast right here.
This makes me think of an episode of Psych where Shawn arranges his record collection in order of “sweetness.” This is all to say, I would very much enjoy hearing details about your categorization.
I am v. serious about how my art history books (relics of my grad degree are ordered). It involves lots of categories and subcategories, with a combo of period/chronological ordering. Very Important Stuff.
Ha! Thanks. I think my enthusiasm petered out fairly quickly, because I can’t remember many details. I know the first level was alphabetical, then sub-levels were numerical. It definitely was not better than Dewey.
Sweetness could be a very useful ordering logic. I may try that. I had to reorder my bookshelves (due to reflooring + furniture moving), and although the books are in general categories (religion/philosophy, Pratchett, Tolkien, Latin/Caribbean, Agatha Christie, PG Woodhouse, paperbacks sorted by size, hardbacks sorted by sized, fairy tales, large sets, SF, and Books I Am Going To Read And Then Give Away) it’s definitely not as tight as it should be. I keep dreaming about the day when I can really go through them and give them the order they deserve. Can you tell me more details about your subcategories? I’m always troubled by sizing, and it bothers me immensely that size and subject ordering can never be exactly right. I imagine art history books are particularly troublesome that way, what with them big fancy pictures and stuff.
I think my parents wouldn’t have let me read scary books like Goosebumps (I base this solely on the fact that I wasn’t allowed to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark?) but I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway because I am a wimp. I think my parents just thought reading was always ok, but movies and TV were a whole other thing. I still have a chip on my shoulder about not being allowed to watch Jurassic Park when I was 9.
I read one Goosebumps book. I remember it vividly to this day. I was scared by it even while aware of how ridiculous it was.
Another ‘scary’ book that I self-censored: Bunnicula. The bunny vampire that sucks the juice out of plants. My friend and I were reading a chapter a night together, and I distinctly remember stopping after the chapter where the rabbit escapes his cage. “He got OUT OF THE CAGE WITHOUT OPENING THE LOCK, Lauren. I am not reading any more of this!”
Oh self-righteous 9-year-old me.
Not necessarily forbidden but I was #precocious as a child so I read a lot of things waaaaay too young. A Wrinkle in Time is pretty fine for an 8 year old, Many Waters slightly less so, A House Like a Lotus- probably not but it was a series so I had to read the whole thing!! *shrug*
Oh Many Waters, what a sexy, sexy book. Read it in middle school.
Ooh I remember trying to read A House Like a Lotus in fourth or fifth grade because I was a L’Engle completist, and realizing fairly quickly that this was a Grown Up book that was Not For Me.
I loved the hell out of it in my early teens, but I have a feeling at least a couple of aspects would make me cringe now.
I think it was A Severed Wasp I really had trouble with. Oh, and at about seven I flipped through Two-Part Invention, read her pretty awful 50s hospital birth story (I think they forgot to take out the placenta or something?!?) and Noped out of there.
MANY WATERS adolescent awakening right there. First you’re a normal child doing normal child like non sex things and then BAM you want to naked hang out with nephilim in the desert and make out with twins it was weird
I read Many Waters c. 5th grade & was so horrified by the sexy sex that I buried it at the bottom of my locker for the rest of the year. Eventually I donated it to the library; I was afraid my parents would find my copy (??) and flip to the incriminating pages (???)
I dont remember there being any actual sex described. There were Yalith’s apricot breasts all over the place (which confused me as I had not encountered poetic descriptions of breasts before but I had encountered both actual breasts and actual apricots and they were not alike) but the rest was just….. insidiously sexy? Like you’re reading it and dont really notice but by the end of the book its like goodness me I just hit puberty.
I don’t remember the sexy sex (although I do remember the nudity and the hawt angels and the hawt baaaad angels, look at that, apparently I remember the sexy sex after all) but I DO remember this horrific description of a poor little human girl trying to give birth to a Nephilim baby for, like, three days. Gyaaaaaah.
Yeah that was bad. There was a lot of tearing……
But still hot damn the angels could get it. Only thing that ever tempted me into christianity.
yesss we are friendssss how many books did I read where I completely missed the *subtext* or not even subtletext! so many. same with L’Engle.
also, side note: my aunt got me this book called Barbie: the unauthorized biography of a real doll for my 10th birthday and clearly had not really even read the back cover. Neither did my folks. It was mindblowing. The history of the Barbie doll as it relates to sex shops, eating disorders, feminism, identity politics, and many other things that I’m probably forgetting now. I read it 100x. I leant it out in college to this girl who never gave it back and I’m still a little bitter. It was so enlightening and totally informed my emerging sociopolitical worldview, which is way bizarre considering that I lived in rural Oklahoma.
OMG me too! I was twelve, and I read my book literally to pieces and had to buy a single copy because pages were falling out of mine. Definitely mindblowing.
(I’m friends with MG Lord on Facebook! She has no clue who I am, but it makes me feel cool.)
I was never forbidden from reading stuff, but my parents did sometimes see what I was reading and go, “I dunno if that’s appropriate for you…” To which I’d respond, “But I want to read it!” and they wouldn’t push the issue further.
The two I’m thinking of in particular are Clan of the Cave Bear and another book whose title escapes me. It was set in French colonial Vietnam and I swear it was called Indochine, but Google is saying such a book does not exist.
Perhaps Margaret Duras’s L’Amant (The Lover)?
Man, that was too intense for me at 20.
No, it was fiction. I googled “fiction book set in French Inochina” and I think I found it?? It is indeed called Indochine and it’s by Christie Dickason. The plot synopsis sounds about like what I remember.
Ok in that book is there a part where the main character puts blood on her lips and looks at herself in shop windows and thinks shes sexy? Because I remember reading a book about French Indochina and that is the only part of it that I remember.
I read that in a French class in college and wow. The book was awkward enough to discuss in class (a class almost entirely made up of young women, with an older male professor) but then we had to watch part of the movie as a class too, which was incredibly awkward for me at the time.
There’s a movie Indochine staring Catherine Deneuve that fits that description, but I have no idea if it was a book first.
No, no relation I think.
Clan of the Cave Bear! My mom actually recommended that one to me. But then again she was never strict about sex stuff. Maybe because she’s a gynecologist.
My dad didn’t know I was reading either his comics or the books from his scifi and fantasy bookcase until it was Too Late. I think he probably felt bad about a child that young being exposed to Hellblazer, but he couldn’t stop me.
That said, I was soundly punished for reading the Fionavar trilogy after being told not to, and I hadn’t even ENJOYED it. Perhaps because I was ten. Dad also suggested a few years later that I shouldn’t read Game of Thrones (I took his advice and was spared).
What was inappropriate about Fionavar? Sex scenes?
Dangerously high levels of masturbatory prose…
Well, there’s that drawn-out rape in book 1 that goes on to be, arguably, the linchpin for the entire plot. I remember it not being super explicit, but I also remember it messing with my head when I read it in high school. OP’s dad had a point.
ohhhhhh right. I’ve skipped that bit on re-reads so I completely forgot about it.
I love Fionaver! But I also read it very young and don’t r3member it much, just loving. (But loving Tigana more) (I still read Kay.)
Kay is *amazing,* and I am so looking forward to his next book, coming out in less than two weeks. However, I read Fionavar several years after I’d read other, later, better books of Kay’s. And as I read Fionavar book 1, I kept running into scenes where I thought, “Wow, he would write that so much better today.” (Gave up on Fionavar in book 2)
I am delurking entirely to gush at encountering more than 2 GGKay fans in one place. Also, to emphatically yes that he would write so many things better now. (Except Lions. It is perfect.)
My parents didn’t forbid me from reading anything, but when I was in about 2nd or 3rd grade my school librarian wouldn’t let me check out books from the “big kids” section. I was ready for chapter books without pictures, and apparently all of them were taboo!
I was so lucky with school librarians–was actively encouraged to read anything I wanted. I can’t believe how much hassle people get from librarians about reading ‘challenging’ books. I guess librarians have to worry about litigious parents…
When I was in middle school (at a tiny K-12 school in the middle of nowhere), my mom fought with the principal to get me access to the high school library. They were really reluctant but I was well beyond the books they had in the elementary/middle school library by that time. Until she could get me access, I just read her books, which meant I’d read Outlander and Pillars of the Earth when I was still a little young to really get what was going on.
Yeah the librarians at the public library used to kick me out of the YA section unless my parents were with me. Ugh.
This! i had to have a parent-teacher conference because in 6th grade I wanted to read Rebecca(not even an ambitious choice) and my language arts teacher thought I was being a jerk. MY TEACHER! What a perplexing appointment that was… I only forgive her because she took large amounts of time during class to read Harry Potter to us aloud.
My mom ripped The Princess Diaries out of my hands when I was about nine because I asked what “testicular” meant, omitting the word “cancer” that appeared next to it.
Even leaving out the “cancer” part, testicular is very seldom used in an erotic context though.
“Ohhhhhhh baby,” she said, touching his testicular region…
Doesn’t work!
My parents never cared what I read, but they probably should have, because someone accidentally shelved The Mists of Avalon in our children’s section and I picked it up because it was long, I was a quick reader, and had a horse and a cool looking lady on the cover…
In what was probably vast negligence on her part, my PA (Project Arrow aka ‘smart kid classes’) English teacher in middle school handed the Mists of Avalon to a few of us in, oh, 6th grade or something with the comment, “it’s about King Arthur. You guys can probably handle it.”
…I was vaguely traumatized.
Wait, why are we all hating on Mists of Avalon? *Isn’t* it a feminist retelling of Arthurian legend? What did I miss?
It is… sort of?
But I seem to recall there being a LOT of inappropriate sex stuff as far as books-for-small-children went, and also incest up the wazoo, and i think someone being stuffed into a tree, and…
then there’s the author and her husband pedophilia thing, yes. SADFACE. ALL THE SADFACE.
Incest and being stuffed into trees is sort of par for the course with arthuriana though
What I hated (HATED) about it was the banality of all the characters – every time there was a chance to make a character or situation more nuanced or interesting, she studiously avoided doing so and leaned on old tired tropes and generalizations. Pissed me off SO hard.
Oh, that’s true. I guess I just accepted that this book’s characters were rather flat. Many books are like that, and that’s not a dealbreaker for me if the story is interesting. My biggest complaint for this book is that the characters change their minds, and then pretend like they never held their first opinion. E.g., Igraine gives up her Avalonian ways and spends the rest of her life a devout Christian, but then at her death announces that she’s been faking Christianity all along; Morgaine pines after Lancelet her whole adult life, until she gets over him, and then decides that not only does she not love him now, but she never did; Gwenhwyfar also pines after Lancelet her whole adult life, even to the point of acknowledging him as her true love for like two glorious hours when she finally runs away with him, and then realizes that she never loved him either. It’s ok, characters! You’re allowed to change your minds! You just don’t have to be all WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA about it.
O dear. That is not a kid’s or even a YA book.
I’m not sure if a sleepy librarian wasn’t paying attention, or if a parent accidentally left it there while picking out a book for a child, or what but… yeah it definitely is not. I understood approximately 25% of it, and then read it as a teen and went “ooooooops”
This is also the library I posted about illegally working at when I was a teen dirtbag so maybe this is just the most-disreputable-but-not-really-harmful library that exists?
“the most-disreputable-but-not-really-harmful library that exists” sounds like a REALLY great starting point for an excellent movie ^_^
(shut up and take my money gif goes here)
I was SUPER into that book at 13. I was not old enough to read it, but the miniseries happened and the book HAD to be better, right?
I was given that book as a Bat Mitzvah gift. By an adult. “Hey, here’s a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Legend!”
I really wonder if she had actually read it.
I’d never read Mists of Avalon, so I just went to check it out on Goodreads, and there’s some comments about the author and her husband being terrible people (pedophilia conviction terrible). D:
Oh I loved Mists of Avalon (age 12 or so) SO, SO much — I want to reread it, sort of, to find out why, but mostly not. Also her other one, about Cassandra.
I read the Kassandra one way too young, too.
Oh yes, all her spellings, I had forgotten about that!
My GRANDMOTHER gave me her copy of that when I was 12. Because she knew I liked fantasy books. WELP, that was an experience.
Oh god, I did a book report on that book in eighth grade. I…probably left out very large chunks of the plot.
I read that in 7th grade and carried it EVERYWHERE with me, not realizing that other people actually knew how dirty it was.
I also remember looking up “phallus” in the dictionary.
Maybe everyone around you was like me, though, because I definitely saw at least one person reading Mists of Avalon in my middle school and thought nothing of it.
My mom had read it and let me read it! Because I was obsessed with the musical Camelot. At six and a half.
I have very mixed feelings about it now, even aside from the grossness I feel about the author, but M/F/M threesome? Even when the idea of sex mostly creeped me out, I was like that’s cool.
I just posted about this, but for exactly the cited reasons, my father bought it for me when I was eight!
I tried to read The Human Stain by Phillip Roth when I was 11 because it was on some list of 1000 books to read before you die and my dad was, like, “YEAH, NOPE,” and took it away. He remembered to give it back to me when I was in college, at which point I was deeply glad that he saved me from Phillip Roth.
Your dad was carrying out a valuable public service. Now I’m giggling at the idea of sneaking up on insufferable dudes reading Roth and swiping the book out of their hands while yelling ‘YEAH, NOPE!’
Judy Blume, “Forever,” read it at age 7.
I thought references to “smoking grass” referred to pretending weeds were cigarettes.
And that’s not the worst thing I misunderstood about that book.
This book was passed around like contraband at my school. We didn’t even know about “Wifey” until much later.
Yes! I think for a certain aged cohort, Forever was the contraband of choice. And yes, I was confused about the casual references to “coming”, but even more so that every adult in the book treated the 17 y.o characters like they too were grown ups.
Following as a close second: The Kent Family Chronicles and The Thornbirds.
I was allowed to read any and every book I wanted, with the one exception being (for some reason) American Gods, which came out when I was 13. In retrospect, that was probably a good decision, if only because it meant that I appreciated it a million times more once I finally read it when I was 18.
Probably the only reason I’d withhold reading from any hypothetical kids of mine would be “you’ll appreciate this much more later”.
ARE YOU THERE GOD IT’S ME MARGARET
i am 100% serious, stepmom was not on board
I was not on board with that book. I read like 2 chapters and moved on 😉
Dude. I read that book at age 7 (wasn’t forbidden, but no one noticed and I thought I was doing something bad) and that’s how I learned about periods. I am forever grateful to that book for allowing me to spend my childhood and adolescence thinking that periods were a good positive thing because they were a sign of growing up and impending womanhood (and that these things were good). Growing up in a house where periods were too shameful to be talked about and meant you were ritually unclean etc, Are You There God It’s Me Margaret was the perfect antidote.
I don’t even remember most of that book now- I think the main character and her friends looked at Playboy and played 2 Minutes In The Closet? maybe? and had a competition for who would get their period first? idk. But I would definitely support finding a period-positive book, leaving it “hidden” in a closet, and letting my stepdaughters read it on the sly. (Obviously in our house, though, there would be open discussion and no period-shaming, so maybe this isn’t necessary?)
My mom had Some Words with my school after we finished reading that book. It was assigned as summer reading between 2nd and 3rd grade. She had not planned on explaining that aspect of womanhood to me quite so soon. My little brother liked to chant I MUST, I MUST, I MUST INCREASE MY BUST afterward.
I totally read it on my own like, 5 times by the time I was 12. Don;t even know how we got a copy in the house?
my mom’s strategy for avoiding Sensitive Topics that would make her Uncomfortable: casually buy secondhand copies of books on said topic and leave on lower shelves in the den for kids to read and feel like they’re being sneaky while sparing her nerves.
I didn’t have Margaret, but I quite enjoyed Starring Sally J Friedman as Herself and read it multiple times in elementary school.
Same. That and The Diary of Anne Frank were the only two books my mom outlawed.
I was like 8 or 9 and I guess she thought they were too old for me. I read them both any way and that was the last time she tried to limit my reading.
My tiny Christian elementary school’s librarian tried in vain to forbid me from reading things that she deemed too hard for me. We were required to check out and complete at least one book every two weeks. However, I’d already read through the whole 5th grade level catalog and really, REALLY wanted to read Anne of Green Gables (“the words are too big,” the librarian said) or The Hobbit (“too scary”).
Eventually, she told me that if I could make it through Pilgrim’s Progress in less than a month and pass a reading comprehension test on it, I could check out whatever I wanted.
My parents thought this was nonsense. My English teacher offered to circumvent the librarian for us and lend me HER copies of the Anne books, but my dad took the whole thing as an absurd challenge. He helped me work my way through the King’s English of Pilgrim’s Progress. We liberally sprinkled phrases like “frenzied distemper” into our conversation. I’m sure we were insufferable.
I made a B on the comprehension test, devoured all the Anne books, and transferred to a less ridiculous school not long afterward.
This is so great.
That is some first-rate dadness right there. Also, what the hell, librarian.
This is glorious and I love everything about it and I am now going to start using “frenzied distemper” all the time. I teach middle and high school so Lord knows I’m gonna have plenty of opportunity.
I HATE gatekeeper librarians. Most kids will give up reading things they don’t understand! Suggest they also try something else more on their level! I have only rarely run into these people myself, and my limited forays out of the juvenile room were some of my fondest memories of wandering the library as a young person.
(I will also forever be grateful to the librarian at my school library who surreptitiously loaned me classroom copies of books in a series I liked because they didn’t have them otherwise. Bless you, good librarians!)
How was Pilgrim’s Progress?
Kind of a slog, but I did get through it. I was 10. I’ve wondered if I’d enjoy it more now.
Sent from my iPhone
What an evil librarian! The power had clearly gone to her head.
My parents had no idea what I was reading book-wise, but shortly after I subscribed to Sassy magazine my mom read one issue and made me cancel it.
They were much more strict about TV than books; I wasn’t allowed to watch “The Facts of Life” (because they talked about the facts of life, I guess?) or Saturday Night Live or bunches of other stuff that all my friends watched. I guess their strictness paid off on one respect: I’m married to a pastor. But it also backfired a little because Pastor Husband and I watch pretty much anything and everything on TV, the trashier the better. 🙂
My mom didn’t like me reading Teen or Sassy so I didn’t have a subscription but my aunt got Glamour so I read that instead. I also got into X-Files because of that aunt.
My mom gets a rotating selection of free magazines sent to her because she is a physician and has her own office. She used to keep them around the house for a few days before bringing them to her office. I remember hiding in the bathroom to read Redbook (which always had a scandalous story or two).
Judy Blume, though my sisters and I still snuck it. My mother kept getting swindled by Judy, she’d let us read something like Superfudge or Starring Sally J Freedman, because they looked like there couldn’t possibly have anything to do with sex in them, but she was faced with 7 year old me asking what a bordello was because I saw the word in Sally J.
(In retrospect, ‘bordello’ was probably the most innocent, hilariously dated ‘naughty’ word I could have possibly come across, but it was still too much for my mother)
ETA: Sweet Valley High were swiftly banned when one my older sister was reading was revealed to have Actual Sex in it. I can still remember the cover – it was Jessica with arms around a guy with what would now be considered a hipster ‘tache)
The depressing part about that is that the Actual Sex in that book is actually Attempted Unsuccessful Sexual Assault.
haha “love and other indoor sports” is still my favorite from that book.
My mom was a little creeped out I read her copy of Letters to Judy, which was basically an incredibly depressing collection of letters children wrote her about terrible things in their lives. Including a lot about incest.
Letters to Judy was so horrifying! I compulsively read it, but it was pretty traumatising as a young ‘un. I’m grateful that my childhood was so privileged that the situations the poor kids in the letters were going through were completely alien to me, and sad for those kids.
Between Parent and Child. And the only reason I wanted to read it, my mother kept it on top of the refrigerator instead of in her library stack on the table.
Beowulf instead of Faulkner? One of life’s wiser choices, regardless of the age of the reader. Hwæt!
The only book I remember being told I couldn’t read by my parents was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I have no memory of why but I definitely read other inappropriate things my parents didn’t police.
My aunt on the other hand once gave me a book with 3 sentences scribbled out because she thought they were bad and my mother thought it was the height of ridiculousness. (It was the book Love From Your Friend, Hannah. Did anyone else read those books? They were amazing!)
I didn’t read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn until maybe 2-3 years ago! I really liked it and wished I’d caught it as a younger me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is surprisingly frank about sex in some places. (And there is the quite creepy bit about the child molester (murderer?) lurking in the neighborhood). I mean, I don’t think it’s inappropriate, but I’ve always loved the conversation Katie and Francie have about whether Francie should have had a one-night stand, and Katie is like “As your mother, I have to say GOD NO DO YOU KNOW WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED but as a woman, well. . .”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, age 13, for obvious reasons, and The Diary of Anne Frank, age 8, for “not being ready to learn about genocide” reasons.
See I was given Anne Frank at about 8 for “it’s time you learned about genocide” reasons
I came across it at 8, read it, and Mom had the “so now you have to help your kid understand genocide, stat, because she won’t stop crying” problem dumped in her lap.
Yes, my mom also said no to Anne Frank when I was 8ish for the same reason. I’m pretty sure I read it relatively young because I still own a diary clearly inspired by her that I started when I was 9 or 10.
The closest my mom ever got to banning anything came after Miss Brown, the librarian at our branch, called her into her office to inquire whether she knew I’d checked “Little Women” out 57 times in the past year-and-a-half (I was nine). Now, Mom knew I liked the book, but not the extent to which it had gotten to be a bit of an obsession (I can still, 40-odd years later, quote much of the first chapter almost verbatim).
She suggested that I give it a rest for a while and at least move on to “Little Men.” She finally got me hooked on big Victorian novels like “Vanity Fair” and “The Forsyte Saga,” which helped cure my Alcott addiction.
All of this is all the odder when you know that I’m male. I was just really into those March sisters.
My great-grandmother forbid my grandmother from reading Little Women because of Beth.
When I was in third grade my dad wouldn’t let me watch Alice in Wonderland on tv because of drugs, so I went to my room and read Carrie.
I was never forbidden from reading anything, largely because I had already finished the books before they had a chance to notice I’d started them. When my mother got into the Oprah Book Club, she had a bunch of those around, and my mother did have a certain look of horror when she saw me putting What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day back on the shelf, realizing I’d just finished it, and realizing that there was nothing she could do about it. But she had a sort of fatalism about it all that was largely correct in this instance, so.
The only time I can remember this happening to me is when a meddling school librarian saw me reading a copy of The Golden Compass that my parents or an aunt had given me without having read it. I was probably 8 or 9, and she told my parents it was inappropriate, and they told me I had to wait a couple years to read it. I had already started it! Granted, I probably was too young for it, but I’m guessing her opposition had more to do with the Christianity stuff than with how scary it was.
Oh gosh, I only got shit about reading The Golden Compass when I was 20 and in college, reading it for the 2nd time after my first run through at 12. And it was from an aunt about the atheism stuff.
I tried to lend my Catholic coworker The Golden Compass for his 9-year-old to read along with a stack of others. He calmly said “I think we’ll leave that one behind”. Dang well-informed Catholics knowing when books are secretly atheist…
Read the first one at 6 or 7, spent the next three or so years devouring them and re-reading, obsessively. Had not much of a clue about the religious-controversy stuff until much later, but had a firm grasp of everything else. Still love those books, still mad about the movie.
I don’t think anyone ever forbade VC Andrews books, but they were certainly not encouraged. I didn’t have the guts to actually posess a copy, so my friend and I snuck into the adult section of the library and read them in the stacks. Once I almost got into a fistfight with a man because I said most girls read these books and probably his sister did too. He refused to believe it.
The only thing my mom ever did truly ban was Sweet Valley High, which I wanted to read when I was in like, 2nd or 3rd grade? I think she just thought it was too quick to be enamored with dating and high school drama, and also she kind of hates blonde stuff.
When I was 11 my dad gave me a bunch of discarded books from the high school he worked at. I read the Great Gatsby and The Stranger in the same week and I was like woah, BOOKS ARE INTENSE!
My mom wouldn’t let me read the Sweet Valley High or Babysitters Club books! Sigh, those were such cool girls on the covers. Coolness I’ll never know!
My dad was always giving me discarded books from the high school he worked at too.
Somehow, we didn’t have a copy of “Flowers in the Attic” in our house, but we DID have “Petals on the Wind” and “If There Be Thorns.” I read both voraciously, starting at about…. 12? I think? And I knew instinctively to hide them from my parents because of the weird feeling I got when I read them.
I did that when IT started freaking me out because even though I was scared shitless both by the supernatural parts and the creepy human parts, I knew I’d never find out what happened if anyone got wind.
I remember reading Memoirs of a Geisha when I was in fifth grade, and then warning my aunt not watch it for a family movie night because I thought it was inappropriate for her children (I was a self-righteous ten year old). But my parents didn’t really censor us, most likely because they had no idea what I was reading. My middle school library also had a bunch of those Dragonriders of Pern, which I revisited recently and contained a relatively high amount of gay sex, polyamory, and just general sex, considering the sex ed at that school contained literal bible verse about the evils of homosexuality.
I bet there’s a very cool librarian to credit with the Pern books being included! My school librarian would definitely lift one eyebrow in the direction of books she thought we might like (but which probably wouldn’t have been available if the admin team had read them).
So what you’re saying is that I should read them now?
Probably not. They don’t hold up well – they’re an excellent example of books that were ahead of their time but are behind ours. I reread the first six a couple years ago and was kind of shocked by the sexism, homophobia, consent issues and generally really weird attitudes abou sex.
As a child who was obsessed with both dragons and reading, I started reading the Dragonriders of Pern books when I was about 10. My mom actually recommended them to me. I kind of just skimmed past the sex scenes at first because I thought they were boring and didn’t advance the plot (wow I was a little snot).
I was also obsessed with dragons and reading! A neighbor who wasn’t very familiar with either of those topics bought me two books for my 11th birthday, Red Dragon and Dragons of Eden, which are about cannibalism and evolution respectively.
So much of the sex in the Pern books is gross and rapey that I kinda wish I had been forbidden to read them. (The antidote for that is actually hidden in one of the YA ones, Dragondrums, though. Such very explicit consent in the fire-lizard sex scene!)
I think (but am not positive) that the newer books written by her son are actually much more consent-focused? Those were the ones with poly relationships and I do remember maybe a few conversations about what they would and wouldn’t be comfortable with as couples? But it has still been a couple of years since the last time I read one so you can’t really quote me on that.
When I was 11, we went on a school trip to Visit An Author And Get Excited About Books, and to finish the day we visited the attached bookstore and were allowed to buy a book. I was browsing the shelves and one of my teachers tried to hurry me up by suggesting that I go with Dragonsong, since it had a dragon on the cover. Didn’t I like dragons?
I did like dragons.
I took the book with great interest. Meanwhile, the other teacher twigged that maybe McCaffrey is not the best choice for a child, and pointed this out to the other teacher.
They got distracted arguing with each other so I seized the moment to sidle off and buy it. It was amazing. Also in my first teacher’s defence, possibly the most kid-friendly Pern book.
My parents never curtailed my reading choices but I had a very low tolerance for horror/suspense so I sort of curtailed myself. My mom didn’t bat an eye when my 80 something Great-Aunt started giving me all her Harlequin and Sillouette paperbacks after she finished them. I was 12, they were very educational.
Like many of you, my reading was mostly unsupervised due to the sheer volume of books I would check out all the time. (And I was certainly not broadcasting it or asking questions.)
There were specific books that my mom discouraged but she had to have read something negative about them or looked at them in the first place. Books I was told I shouldn’t read:
Sweet Valley High (though I read umpteen Babysitters Club books)
Nancy Drew Case Files (specifically Case Files, I could read any of the original series or the contemporary continuation in paperback that was still numbered accordingly – remember those?)
Madeline L’Engle: her Christian beliefs were viewed as heretical/suspicious/not really Christian… (as you might expect only Tolkien and Lewis were viewed with respect)
Phyllis A. Whitney: who I was allowed to read and then not b/c Mom read something about her having New Age beliefs?
That’s all I remember. They certainly lost track of most of what I was reading after a while. Mom was horrified by Harry Potter when they first came out, but I was in college at that point (book 5 came out the summer before my junior year). I ended up buying them but keeping them hidden on the bookshelf in my closet.
Oh, yes, and Judy Blume was forbidden.
I found Phyllis A. Whitney at my VERY RELIGIOUS piano teacher’s house and read her! Oh wow. I was also not allowed to read ANY Nancy Drew because my grandmother kept on checking out the ones that had “racy” covers and my mom thought they were mine.
Yes! Nancy Drew Case Files! I read the crap out of those in 5th grade because my school library didn’t have a whole lot of ‘advanced reader’ books.
I loved sassy, modern Nancy who went to Spring Break on the beach and had a cell phone #goals
School librarian at my small Catholic K-12 school wouldn’t let me check out with The Giver in sixth grade and threatened to tell my mom (a perpetual school activities volunteer who was usually available somewhere in the building) if I tried to read it without taking it out of the library. So I borrowed it from a friend? And found that it was a beautiful story, and very anti-euthanasia? Like, were they trying to prevent me from being sad?
In eighth grade my English teacher assigned everyone American authors to make biographical reports about, and with careful consideration for the maturity levels of the class, gave me Anne Rice. My parents sat me down and lectured me like I was in trouble when I told them and made me switch with a student who had F. Scott Fitzgerald. The English teacher explained that she had counted on me writing an anti-trashy-novel screed but allowed the switch.
In ninth grade, my first year at a SECULAR PUBLIC school, we were assigned I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, which my mom had heard had molestation in it, but didn’t flip out until after I had read that part. To keep her from challenging my teacher and embarrassing me, I handed over the book and let her read the chapter, and she agreed it was handled age-apropriately and let me have it back.
The next summer I was part of a three-student pilot program from my youth ministry group who were apparently little goody two-shoes expected to report back on a Catholic high schoolers’ retreat at Notre Dame University. I had a great time, meeting my first ever liberal and queer college Catholics, one of whom gave me his annotated copy of The Bhagavad Gita he had read for a world religions class with the Jesuits. My youth minister didn’t even let me finish my gushing report on the ride home before he took the book away, and our youth group never spoke of the Notre Dame program again.
Luckily, I was already ruined.
OOH, there was a panic over the giver at my Catholic K-12 too! I was in 5th grade, and it took me years to finally read that book. Then I couldn’t figure out why people were panicked over it! The euthanasia? The naked dream?
Also banned at my school: Beavis and Butthead and Bart Simpson.
My mother let me read Stephen King when I was in grade four. As an adult I have no idea what to think of this, except that it doesn’t seem to have hurt me any.
In middle school I was banned from reading books, full stop. However, my eighth-grade English class required outside reading, two books per quarter. My stepmother told me she would decide what my outside reading was…
…and handed 13-year-old me The Sound and the Fury and Clan of the Cave Bear.
damn
“banned from reading”
What. Even.?
Yeah, this! Who does this?!? Re: reading choices – what was she THINKING?
I was already banned from leaving the house (except for school), answering the telephone, playing video games, or using a computer, but my bad behavior* persisted, so books were the next thing to go. She said she would also ban me from writing if I didn’t shape up, which even then I was like “loooool how are you gonna enforce that**”
*My stepmother now insists I was always a good kid. My dad’s comment: “wow, I don’t remember her doing that. I’m sure there was a reason. Maybe you weren’t turning in your homework or something.”
**I had a friend smuggle me Tamora Pierce books and a Gameboy Advance and kept the subterfuge up for two years, so she couldn’t even perfectly enforce the bans she DID have in place
My mother once threatened me with this and I literally almost threw up from terror. And the belief that if she punished me with no reading I would never be able to sleep.
(The thing was, I was such a wussy kid I don’t think I was ever actually “punished” after about seven or so, because I was so easily cowed by yelling/scolding.)
Harry Potter when it first came out. Anything that looked like it had supernatural elements because it would ‘invite demons into our house.’ Mists of Avalon, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Grapes of Wrath in high school. Meanwhile, I found a picture book by Doris Sanford about child molestation at the Christian bookstore and was really, truly, seriously disturbed by it.
Parents were hardcore Evangelicals. So now I’m writing a thesis about how restricting children’s access to factual information and appropriate escapism while forcing the party line reeeeeally screws them up.
Grapes of Wrath? Did you try to explain the whole Jim Casey = Christ symbolism? I mean, it’s a pretty biblically minded book.
Didn’t get that far – they saw the sex talk on p. 24 and yoink! the book disappeared.
Not that I minded that much at the time; it made my tenth grade reading list shorter and left more time for the things I actually wanted to be reading. If only there’d been enough sex in Moby Dick to warrant having it taken away, too.
I have never made it through Moby Dick. I got a good way through and then one day I was like, I am tired of your whining, nope.
I would like to read that paper when you’re done. Or even before you’re done tbqh.
I was allowed to read “Gone with the Wind” when I was ten, and asked my mom at a family Christmas party what an orgy was. I pronounced it with a hard g.
I first read it the summer after second grade. I missed a whoooooooooole lot of subtext. (EDIT: and misunderstood quite a lot of text, too).
OH MAN, I did the same thing–well, not at a Christmas party, and I think I was maybe eight, and it was a different book, but “asked my mom what an orgy was” and “pronounced it with a hard g,” yes. She got out the dictionary and read me and my brother the definition. She also explained all the Bad Words in Les Misérables to us before taking us to see it when we were ten and eight (but I still skipped over “Lovely Ladies” every time I listened to the cast album).
Bonus: at the ballet once I asked my mom the definition of the word ‘erotic’. She got this look on her face and I backpedaled as hard as I could but she explained it anyway.
Oh, this brought up a very vivid memory of being on a Girl Scout camping trip when I was in middle school, where one girl had a copy of “It” and we spent the entire trip passing it around and debating what an orgy was. We ended up with two camps, which were “a small orgasm” (I mean, obviously) (also we were only about 70% sure what an orgasm was) and “a toga party” (someone had asked her mom and been informed that it was a Roman word for a big party, so…).
I first came across the word ‘orgy’ in ‘Asterix in Switzerland’ and thus believed it referred only to a wild party with a cheese fondue. Used it as such in conversation with my family, to startled looks from my parents.
I too believed for years that ‘orgies’ were simply a word for ‘Roman parties with lots of food and drink, with an outside chance of getting stuck together by miles of fondue cheese’
OH MY GOD ME TOO. I found out what it actually was aged about 13 when a group of actors came in to my school to do a workshop about Twelfth Night with us. They asked us to shout out suggestions for what the characters might have done for fun on the boat before it sunk, and I yelled ‘have an orgy!’
Curse you, Asterix.
Now that’s some Shakespeare criticism I would read. But my condolences on your embarrassment!
I was pretty much allowed to read anything when I was a child (case in point: at age 8 I decided to read Moby Dick and my mother basically said “go for it”) but she did tell me frequently not to read Geek Love, by Katharine Dunn, which I also wanted to read at age 8. I did anyway by way of reading standing up and then hiding it whenever anyone came into the living room, and came away with both a very skewed understanding of sex and a huge fascination with cults.
My mom read the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich when I was in middle school, which in turn led to me picking those up. (I read a lot of cozy mysteries in middle school, mostly the kind starring cats or middle-aged caterers, so I think I thought that Janet Evanovich was in that category for some reason.)
Anyhow, I made it to the third or fourth book before my mom noticed that I was reading them. She asked me not to read any more Stephanie Plum and said that she wouldn’t be reading them either because they were “not appropriate.” (I think my response was something like a combination of guilt and admiration followed by picking up the next Sneaky Pie Brown mystery.)
In middle school, I read all the Cat Who mysteries. They’re a good middle point for kids who are too old for Nancy Drew but too young for the more intense mysteries.
YES. I was all about the Cat Who books.
Aw, but those are so tame. That’s adorable.
As many others have mentioned, my parents never banned or censored books in our house. However, I remember once censoring a book for myself in such a way that my poor mom was kind of freaked out. It was one of Bruce Coville’s “My Teacher is an Alien” series, of all things, and I remember I got badly scared by a passage where the characters were visiting an impoverished country, and one of them thought this lady was holding a crumpled paper bag but it turned out to be a dead baby. I freaked out and threw the book away from me in horror, and the bang against the door was so loud my mom came up to find out what happened. She ended up having a severe conversation with my (non-alien) teacher about what she’d allowed me to read.
Note, I was maybe about 10 when this happened, and was cheerfully devouring stuff like Dragonlance, Lord of the Rings, and a bunch of other pop fantasy aimed at adults. But this book actually intended for children just freaked me out so terribly. To this day I hate reading or watching anything that deals with dead children.
Wow, I don’t remember that part of that Bruce Coville series! I probably would have been horrified by that too.
Wow, never read that many of those books. They were weird though!
Go Ask Alice came out in 1971. One of my girlfriends had an older sister who had this book and Teresa “borrowed” it from her. I read it my bedroom tactfully disguised with a homemade brown paper bag book cover. I remember being blown away by the young girl’s story of sex, drugs, and rebellion.
So what I’m getting from this thread is that to raise the next generation of Toasties, censor movies and TV but let anything go with regard to books.
That was my parents, too. Only occasionally did I get in over my head. Once, my mom decided to check out “On the Beach” (you know, the post-nuclear apocalypse novel, which … why, mom?) for me. But somehow she checked out some other book with a similar title that turned out to be some thinly veiled Mary Sue romance novel where the protagonist was the object of lust of every male character, including the gay one. It was very perplexing, especially as I kept waiting for the nuclear holocaust part to start.
I’m fascinated (and I probably shouldn’t be, it makes sense) how many of us are coming in here and saying we really read whatever we want. I mean, this is a pretty literary group, so it should be no surprise that people who love to read were wildly encouraged to do so as children for the most part.
It seems like a good parenting strategy, really. TV and movies above your level as a kid can be pretty overwhelming, but mostly you read right over the stuff you’re not ready for in books.
My parents let me read whatever–in fact, my dad used to buy me random fantasy novels because he knew I liked Mercedes Lackey, which is how I ended up doing a seventh grade book report on some horrible Piers Anthony thing. But in high school (circa 2001), my school’s ENTIRE SUMMER READING PROGRAM got shut down for SEVERAL YEARS because one of the options was a book about a kid with a gay dad (“Jack” by A.M. Homes) and a bunch of parents (not mine!) flipped a shit.
MERCEDES LACKEY REPRESENT.
Some of her stuff is terrible (why are Heralds so bad at providing social services or preventing human trafficking?), but some of her work was just lifesaving when I was an awkward teen.
I had to hide all my “fluff” books from my parents for a while (aka, all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelizations). Not because they were forbidden, but because my mom thought it was ridiculous (and maybe too scary? She and dad preferred to listen to murder mysteries on tape for road trips, so idk why supernatural elements are more scary then people being stalked and murdered in creative ways). Sweet Valley High didn’t cause any issues, but I also know I burned through that series by the sixth grade, and I wasn’t into Buffy until middle school, so maybe she thought I was backtracking?
The only thing I remember a librarian trying to stop me from taking out was a collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the third grade. She and my teacher both insisted they call my parents, to which my folks said, “soooooo?”
My mom had to put sanctions on books when we went on car trips, because my sisters and I would read too fast and get bored before we hit our destination.
Speaking of the Buffy novelizations, did you ever read the one that was entirely about Spike, pre-Buffy? I found it in the library way before I ever watched the series, but I really enjoyed it (also there was a lot of vampire sex, so I guess it was a much cooler proto-Twilight)
Maybe? I feel like that’s one I would have had…I’d have to go find the appropriate shoebox of old paperbacks.
Because I got rid of most of the expensive classics from undergrad, and kept the paperback TV novelizations from middle school. 🙂
I don’t understand that car trip book ban. Surely that just means you should have brought more books…?
Signed, the person who had essentially an entire floating library in the back seat of the car throughout childhood, just in case
There’s a lot of people who say ereaders are the WORST, but I have loved all of mine to death because unless the power goes out for a solid week, i can have an entire library IN MY HANDS!
Also, when my first generation Nook finally bit it after 6 happy years, I fully mourned the loss and got the newest version. I don’t love it as much, but I like not needing a booklight.
Yep, me too. I have always carried a book with me nearly all the time, but my kindle enables me to ease the panic I used to get as I neared the end of a book but didn’t have the space or whatever to carry another one with me that day. Now I always have something to read when I finish the current thing.
I keep an as yet unread ’emergency book’ in my car because one time I got stuck in a hail storm and only had an old Woolworths brochure in the car and it was HELL. Now I know better! I’m also the kind of person who needs to read everything, all the time (back of the milk at breakfast, anything at all in the loo, pick up something in the ad breaks while the other person goes to the loo etc etc 🙂 I understand I can be quite annoying.
My book ban was only for short car trips. We had to be driving more than 20 minutes, or I wasn’t allowed to read. This actually did have the desired effect, which was that I had some kind of clue what the roads near my house were like. Handy when I started driving.
My dad was also confused by my love of Buffy and other supernatural horror. But he loved war dramas and never understood why those were too scary for me. Um, maybe because that actually happens?
My parents never put sanctions on books for car trips but I do remember a trip we made out to Texas when I was in middle school that was 17 hours long. So my mom loaded all of us kids up into the mini-van and we drove to another town to their library and let us each check out 5 books. And, obviously, I wanted to read them all right then but she told us not to because otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to read on the trip.
I still managed to read all of those books before we got to our destination and re-read them again on the way back.
I wasn’t forbidden from reading anything as a kid, and in fact rather than ever have The Talk with me my parents handed me books about sex at a very young age and I was on my own from there.
I do remember being at Barnes & Noble once when I was in elementary school and this lady who worked there saw me browsing books and picking up Hatchet, and she told me it would be too “mature” for me. And I was pissed and obvs read it immediately.
The DaVinci Code. My parents are Mormon and had heard that it postulates Jesus having had a wife, which was a big NOPE for them and enough for me to not read it, which is weird, because I don’t think Mormons in general are totally uncool with that idea?
Eh. Your Momron folks did you a solid. No one should have to read that book 😉
haha! That’s what I’ve heard.
I WISH someone had forbidden the DaVinci Code.
On the other hand, it showed me how low the bar is set to be an international best seller.
I yelled at my mom once when I was a teenager cause she never gave me a formal Sex Talk and I had lately learned that this was a thing parents did. “but I bought that book about human sexual development and put it on a high shelf and forbade you to read it,” she replied, “so I knew that you would.” how I wish I had not, just to show her.
she also told me that I should be aware that robert heinlein had no idea how human emotions worked but that was more of a locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen kind of a thing because I had already read all of him and worse things too.
A+ parenting by mom
I don’t remember being given the sex talk, but I do remember a treasured childrens’ illustrated encyclopedia which had a cross section diagram of a couple in-coitus, which is where I learned the word ‘epididimus’ (a great word)
I also did not get the sex talk but found a conveniently placed edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves on a shelf one day. I still don’t know if my mom did that on purpose, but it was a good choice for me since I love to read, but would have found the sex talk excruciatingly embarrassing. Also, Our Bodies, Ourselves is pretty kickass and was a great introduction to all things puberty and sex.
I found Changes In You And Me on my bed one day. It featured transparencies!
I think it was fairly educational. As a voracious but shy reader, a book was probably actually the best way to go.
With my parents, it’s almost like it never even occurred to them that books might have things in them that kids shouldn’t be reading? Admittedly part of this was because I read so much it would have been too much work to keep tabs on what I was reading. They were pretty adamant about following the MPAA rating system for movies, but since books don’t have ratings pretty much anything went. In fact, the only time I was explicitly forbidden from reading a book was when it had an R-rated movie based on it (Silence of the Lambs).
All other times my parents expressed concern were:
Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series: I read these when I was 11, my dad spotted the title and this prompted him to sit me down and explain that we were Catholic, and we didn’t believe in reincarnation, which in turn prompted me to explain to him that “incarnation” and “reincarnation” were two different words. (In retrospect this is hilarious because those books had so many f’d up things to say about sex and women and God that actually, yeah, eleven year old me probably shouldn’t have been reading them)
Memoirs of a Geisha: My mom read this when I was twelve, and then I really wanted to read it, and she finally relented when I was thirteen I think, but told me not to tell my dad.
So pretty much, if it didn’t have some word relating to either sex or heresy in the title, I was home free.
I wasn’t allowed to read any of the books my mom kept hidden in her closet. BUT I DID.
My high school banned The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, 3 years after I graduated, on grounds that it talked positively about masturbation (and had some swearing and some cartoons that contained non-explicit nudity). The brilliant irony is that I wouldn’t ever have read the book in the first place but my high school book club (of which I had been an active member) decided to read that same book and even *paid for* my copy of this novel (which is now one of my favorites and I reread it every year or so), which has since been banned (and as I understand it, has been un-banned since more people read it during the banned period than ever before at that school).
We just read that for our work book club (it was fantastic). It was funny reading all the angry Amazon reviews basically decrying the same things.
We read Sherman Alexie short stories and watched Smoke Signals in my sophomore English class in high school.
But I think my high school was not very concerned with protecting us from sex. We read The Once and Future King (incest!!) and Brave New World (virtual sex and suicide!) freshman year and read Their Eyes Were Watching God (woman as a sexual being!) sophomore year. And my teachers definitely didn’t shy away from the sex stuff. We spent an entire class period on the pear tree scene.
Sherman Alexie thanks every school system who bans it on Twitter because it always results in a sales bump. Sherman Alexie is the shit.
But really though. I also now use this anytime someone needs a book to read:
“I recommend “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian” by Sherman Alexie. It was banned in my high school, so you know it’s good.”
The only book my mom ever took away from me was Bored of the Rings, because one of my friends picked it up and read out loud a sentence that included the word “dildo” in spite of my VEHEMENT SHUSHING. I was in about the fifth grade and clearly had no idea what a dildo was, but I somehow knew that it was DEFINITELY NOT a thing that needed to be read out loud in front of my mom.
Good god, Bored Of The Rings. To be fair, when I read it, I was probably right in the target age range (10? 11?).
Bored of the Rings is the only book I can remember being forbidden. I read it later and was disappointed that it wasn’t that funny.
Well, that and Heidi. But that’s because my dad read to me every night and after about 2 days he said he couldn’t take it anymore. It was never actually *forbidden.*
(PS hi I’m new!)
hi welcome!
I got into trouble because I was enchanted with the word “dildo” and had made it into a little song I was singing to myself. My mother was perfectly balanced between appalled and amused.
I don’t know what the marketing possibilities are of having a site full of grown-up precocious children who learned about sex from library books, but I hope advertisers on the-toast.net take advantage of this vital demographic.
One of my greatest joys as an aunt to girls was giving them the books their mom would have banned. Nothing was banned in my home–my dad actually gave me Macbeth when I was 7 and recommended King’s Christine to me when I was maybe 11 or 12. My favorite line of his, when handing me some spy novel or whatever, was “If you skip over the bad sex writing, this has a great plot….” That said, both parents adored Shibumi and so I was aware of tantric sex even before my schoolmates had found Clan of the Cave Bear, which my mom recommended to me when I was 11….
My mom was very supportive of reading and books in general, but she HATED “The Giving Tree” and did not let me keep a copy that I got as a birthday gift in first grade. When I got older and read the book in a Gender Studies class, I called to thank her for this decision. (See also: My father’s belief that the TV show Seventh Heaven was “too Christian” and therefore would not let me and my best friend (both Jewish) watch it, so we watched it with the sound off and made up our own story lines).
When I was 10 or 11, I really wanted to read “The Mermaids Singing” by Lisa Carey, probably because it has mermaids in the title and my mom had been reading it. My mom thought I was too young, so the next day I faked a fever to stay home from school and read the whole thing.
The Richard Burton version of A Thousand Nights and a Night! My mum actually bought that for me, but then confiscated it for a few years.
I did read Clan of The Cave Bear and Flowers in the Attic youngish, but old enough to find Flowers pretty ridiculous. Which of course did not keep me from reading the rest of both series, and then comparing the incest-rape scenes between Flowers in the Attic and Dawn (word-for-word identical, I checked).
THANK YOU
Those identical scenes bothered me, too. Be more original, ghostwriters!
Ah! My parents hid lady chatterly’s lover from me after they caught 9 year old me reading (but not fully understanding) any of it. I self-censored after reading a book about spontaneous combustion when I was 7 or 8. I spent the next 2 years worried I would die every time I felt a little too hot.
My mom read the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich when I was in middle school, which in turn led to me picking those up. (I read a lot of cozy mysteries in middle school, mostly the kind starring cats or middle-aged caterers, so I think I thought that Janet Evanovich was in that category for some reason.)
I wasn’t forbidden from any books as a child, which is probably why I read way too many V.C.Andrews books before I had any experiences of my own. However, I stole my teacher’s copy of Dracula in 4th grade, and that truly complicated my life for awhile. I slept with twenty-six stuffed animals placed strategically around my neck and was convinced that my parents were vampires for about a year.
I found the novelization of Alien on the school bus (??? why) and read that. Slept with the covers over my mouth for years, even though I knew perfectly well that a face-hugger would dissolve its way through the covers with acid if it wanted in there.
My dad took away the entire Tanith Lee Tales from the Flat Earth series when I was about 13 or 14, because he discovered it was full of sexy sexy demon sex (some of which was definitely M-M, though to be fair I think he just disapproved of all of it). I tried to explain that I had no interest in the demon sex, I just liked the stories (which was true), but that was insufficient.
Other than that, I was pretty much trusted to read anything I wanted.
The only thing I can clearly remember my parents telling me I couldn’t see/read as a child (aside from basically every Disney movie) was Miss Saigon, which was something I really really wanted to see, for some reason? I think in my head I had tied it into all the Hunter S Thompson and Doonesbury books that were available for my consumption.
The first time I read Harry Potter I was probably way too young and it gave me really vivid nightmares, so I was technically forbidden from reading it again until I was older. Mostly because my parents didn’t want to deal with me refusing to sleep again. I don’t remember the ban ever being lifted, I think I just found the books again and read them and it was fine and that was that.
Other than that I sneakily borrowed “Forever” by Judy Blume from the teen section of the library when I was about 11, read it and was horrified, and hid the library copy in my room somewhere because I didn’t even want to LOOK at it. Then we got lots of late fees and I had to show my parents anything I wanted to get from the library for a few months until they forgot about it.
There’s a Girl in My Headlock, 3rd grade. This book is terrible, but apparently it was marked as “8th grade reading level” and the horrific school librarian at my atrocious elementary school wouldn’t let me check it out. My parents raged against the man and took me to the public library to check it out. I did not enjoy the book, but the sweet taste of moral victory remains.
Jaws, anything Stephen King (I did manage to sneak Misery though), and Harry Potter. If it was written before 1900 I could usually get away with it, so I read SO MUCH gothic romance.
When I was in 6th or 7th grade I think, I read a few Stephen King books and then my brother convinced my dad that I shouldn’t be allowed to read them. I never figured out what he told my dad.
My mom was very supportive of reading and books in general, but she HATED “The Giving Tree” and did not let me keep a copy that I got as a birthday gift in first grade. When I got older and read the book in a Gender Studies class, I called to thank her for this decision. (See also: My father’s belief that the TV show Seventh Heaven was “too Christian” and therefore would not let me and my best friend (both Jewish) watch it, so we watched it with the sound off and made up our own story lines).
I was forbidden from reading exactly one book as a child, which I think was a horror novel that involved pedophilia? It was one of many books from a used booksale, the details are a little fuzzy but it was definitely a hardcover with no dust jacket and it was removed from my pile never to be seen again.
But the true horror was parental interest in what I was reading. My dad thought we needed to talk about the sex in Laws of the Blood and the Tiger and Del books and I was pretty sure we needed to do nothing of the kind. (Weirdly I was also reading a ton of Mary Balogh and Brenda James romances that nobody tried to talk to me about?)
My mother was terrible at hiding books. I knew all her places and would just take the book out and put it back when I was done and she was never the wiser. They were mostly confiscated because I was reading when I was supposed to be doing other things, though. The only book she actually tried to stop me from reading was Silence of the Lambs, around age…12? Which I finished anyway, because: see above, re: terrible at hiding books.
I wasn’t forbidden from reading it, exactly, but I did find my mom’s copy of The Eye of the Needle, something she got from a book-of-the-month club in the 70s, I think? The plot was basically Lady Chatterley’s Lover except if the groundskeeper were a spy and the Chatterleys lived on the Isle of Wight, or something.
I don’t know, but I do remember there being a scene where the spy walks in on the woman as she’s getting dressed after a shower, and from her perspective it’s incredibly dignified and amazing because he doesn’t break eye contact with her. And then later in the narrative, it’s from the spy’s perspective, and he grimly congratulates himself on not having let his gaze drop to her fantastic breasts.
Haha! I had forgotten that scene, until now!
I also like remember the spy waits until after sleeping with the woman to use her husband’s razor, figuring that it didn’t matter at that point. But it took me until now to realise that he put the woman on equal footing with the razor. I am…not that bright?
I read everything and my parents didn’t care/notice. One of my weekly rituals was a Saturday afternoon ride with Dad to the local library, where we’d return our completed books then peel off for our respective sections of interest. I moved rapidly from Kids to YA to GrownUps and, except when we’d bump elbows in the (GrownUps) New Books section, I don’t think Dad ever took note of where my books came from or what I was reading.
I was reading The Red Tent at the same time as my mother at age 12 and she returned it to the library before I could finish it, saying I could check it out again when I was older.
Aside from The Bridges of Madison County, which my mom got really twitchy about once when I’d moved it, my parents didn’t really police my reading.
I do remember my elementary school librarian kept the higher reading level books in a tiny cart near her desk, and when I wanted to read something off it in 4th grade, she insinuated that the books were both too mature for me and above my reading level.
(I won her over, though.)
ETA: I just remembered that my mom censored my magazine reading! I came home as a 13-year old with my first issue of Seventeen (Ivanka Trump was on the cover) and my mom snatched it from me, cut out a few articles and one of those reader-submitted embarrassing stories, gave it back but told me I couldn’t buy another until I was actually 17. That didn’t last.
17 is really for 13-15 year olds who wish they were 17 anyway. Just like Cosmo is for 16-19 year olds who wish they were 30 and flirty and thriving.
(We were not allowed to read either of them, so relied on friends to bring them to sleepovers.)
Yep! By the time I was 17 I had definitely moved on to Cosmo and there was nothing my mom could do about it!
–TV shows banned when I was a kid: Kids Incorporated, Smurfs, She-Ra, He-Man, That Other Show About Smurfs Under the Sea or Whatever, Family Matters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, some episodes of the X Files, basically anything that my mother construed as disseminating New Age spooky occult demon-possessing powers
–Books banned when I was a kid: None! TV is the enemy! How could a book be anything other than innocent? The Bible is a book!
–Books censored when I was a kid: Jurassic Park. After watching the movie in the theater 12 times, my mother decided to read the book. She scratched out every instance of “fuck” and “goddamn” along the way, then passed it on to me.
–Books I wish had been banned or censored when I was a kid: That Margaret George book about Mary I of Scotland. At 11, I could handle sex! What I wasn’t prepared for was bleeding gay anal rape. It was my first exposure to any kind of gay sex and it took me years to realize my nauseated reaction was due to the rape, not the gayness.
I think the only book I was actually not allowed to read was Forever. Mum would flip through any Judy Blume books before check out at the library to make sure they weren’t that one. So I read it in a series of visits to the department store book section while Mum was shopping elsewhere.
I did get caught reading the copy of Flowers in the Attic that had passed around half the grade during religion class in grade 9 and was told I could read anything I wanted instead of paying attention, just not that.
The only thing my parents forbade me to do in relation to reading was to make a rule that I couldn’t pretend to use the bathroom but actually just read in there after I was supposed to be in bed.
Oh yeah, I was forbidden from hiding books in the bathroom cabinets.
My stepdad got mad that I would take his books in with me and yelled at me for it. I’m tempted to say he nearly threw a book at me for that, but that feels disingenuous? Yet not. Hmm.
My mom used to have a stack of magazines in the bathroom, which no one actually read. I would hide my smallish paperback books among the magazines so I could read in the bathroom for half an hour instead of getting ready for bed, without having to sneak the book in and out.
This reminded me – I had a high sleeper bed with a little reading light clipped to the frame. My parents had to resort to putting a timer on the socket the light was plugged into to stop me from reading past my bedtime, figuring that if I tried to unplug said timer, I’d wake them as I climbed down. WRONG. I got very good at creeping down that ladder and avoiding the creaky floorboard.
I had ‘pretending to sleep while actually having a torch and a large book under the covers’ down pat by the time I was 10
Aha, me too.
And when my mom wised to that and checked my bed and room in general for flashlights, I learned to lie on the floor and read in the faint light coming in under my bedroom door. And the trick of ‘going to the bathroom’ so I could leave my bedroom door slightly ajar when I came back and thereby have a bit more light to read by.
My mom admitted to me when I was in my 20s that my actual bedtime was 2 hours after my official bedtime, since she was well aware I was reading under the covers with a flashlight , which she had no problem with.
My mother was extremely strict about what I was allowed to watch on television, but was so the opposite with books that I was forced to read East of Eden when I was 9 or 10 years old, and I wasn’t allowed to read anything I wanted to until I finished it.
I was so young that most of it was lost on me, but there were a few scenes/characters that really stuck with me, in a bad way. What the hell, mother. I was purposely less adventurous with what I chose to read for a while after that, I loathed it so much!
I read everything. All of it. My parents were mostly fine with this when they knew their 2nd-4th grader was digging through their high school lit box (found in a musty corner of the laundry room). They would probably have been less fine if they realized I was also reading Mom’s romance novels.
I ran out of other books! And Dad’s cowboy novels looked way less cool than Mom’s pirate novels.
Also, my 4th grade teacher, may he rest in misery, yelled at me and told me I was lying when I was reading 1984. I still hate you, Mr. Logan! I mean, I had already finished reading The Borrowers, so then I was quietly reading my own book.
I had that happen to me in sixth grade! I’d finished my work in reading class and was quietly reading Anne McCaffrey when my teacher yelled at me and took the book away because I shouldn’t have been reading outside books. My parents were pissed.
I kid you not, an obstetrics nursing textbook. An aunt who was a former nurse overheard me saying something relatively innocuous that she interpreted as me knowing how babies were made, and assumed I’d gotten it from her old nursing school text, and instead of hiding it, forbade me to look in it. Of course, that’s exactly what I did at the next available opportunity, and instead of the forbidden fruit of the old in-out, it talked a lot about anencephalic babies and supernumerary nipples.
My mom told me it probably wasn’t a goid ifea for me to read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath when I was about 12. Of course, I did anyway, and hid it under my bed. Boy do I wish I’d listened to my ma! That book traumatized me.
I don’t think I was ever forbidden to read any books. I remember sneakily reading GO ASK ALICE while crouched in a corner in the library in eighth grade because all of the other girls had read it, and I was too chicken to check it out. (AND I WOULD NEVER JUST SNEAK A BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. Better to hide and finish it in one setting. I fell over when I tried to stand up afterward. Both of my legs fell asleep as they have never since.)
Oh, oh, in high school, my mom bought me a book from a guy on the street. She knew I liked The Vampire Chronicles, and therefore, a new Anne Rice must be up my alley. And then she handed me THE CLAIMING OF SLEEPING BEAUTY, to which I responded NOPE. Like threw it back into her hands with an scandalized explanation about how it was erotica, MOUM. She read it herself instead.
I also liked Rice and my mom never read any of her books, assuming they were all about vampires. When I was 15-16 we were in a bookstore and she saw a copy of Exit to Eden and asked if I had it; I managed to hide my shock and embarrassment enough to say yes* and then sent up a desperate prayer to any deity that was listening that she would not pick it up and read the back cover.
*Purchased maybe year before when I was left at the bookstore while she went grocery shopping.
For some reason, my high school library had a copy of Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden. I’ve always wondered how it got there.
There are only four instances that I can remember of outright book censorship in my house. All three were related to witchcraft and fantasy, because even 90s liberal Catholic parents were afraid of that shit.
1) A friend and I discovered a semi-serious book about witchcraft in the Catholic school library (immediately after Hocus Pocus came out, we were big into witches). There were “spells that medieval witches did” in there, and when my parents discovered I was reading it, it disappeared from my house…and the school library. We got a talking to about how witches weren’t real but don’t mess with that shit anyways.
b) Fourth grade. My parents’ friends gift me with these thin clothbound books about fairies and gnomes and magic and things (I’m not sure of the series?), as well as a fantasy book called Urshurak…my parents make me give away the clothbound books (again, I think they were worried about me taking things too seriously), but let me keep Urshurak, until sometime in the middle of the book. I’ve never been sure, but either I think my mom got freaked out by the busty lady on the cover, or she skimmed the book and ran across something that made her think it was too grown up for me -maybe a sex scene? She took it away in the middle of the book and now I remember very little about it and have never finished it. I feel like there might have been a rape scene that I didn’t recognize as such?
c) One time I got a D & D fiction book out of the library/from the used book store. That got taken away quickly. Just in case. Of…something. My mom remained afraid of D & D up until mid-college, when I told her my friends and I were playing it and she seemed worried about it. Then I laughed. A lot.
As soon as I hit 6th grade, there were pretty much no limits on books, ever. My mom got worried when I read a lot of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike, and asked to read one of them (The Last Vampire). She was slightly horrified (but she’s in a hot tub! with a dude! and then she kills people!), but apparently reassured when my response to her concerns was, “Um, she’s a 5000 year old vampire. Pretty sure she’s not a role model. Jeez mom, it’s not real life.”
I got a lot more censorship of music and movies, which I got around at other people’s houses.
I am ALSO reminded of the thing I hid from my mother: An old paperback called The Girls of Huntington House, which had a pregnant teen on the cover. It was from the 70s, obviously, and not very good, but I guess I learned a lot about how pregnant teenagers got sent to homes back in the day. I hid it because I did not want to precipitate A Conversation About Sex. Eventually my mom found it and was like, “well that looks kind of trashy” years later.
I have a really hazy sense of what is appropriate reading material for various age groups, because I started reading Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffery and MZB etc around the age of ten. The Lackey and MZB my parents gave me, everything else I picked up on my own. The only rules at the library were “no romance novels and if it gives you nightmares, don’t complain”.
I suspect my mom regrets it now, because I read quite a few fantasy novels that focused on supporting women’s sexuality and presented queer and polyamorous relationships as normal. I credit them with helping me realize I was a queer feminist at the tender age of thirteenish.
Oh, yeah. A librarian recommended Lackey around age 12ish, and a friend’s mom gave me McCaffrey about that time. I’m not sure when The Mists of Avalon happened, but it had to have been really close to then. It’s definitely shaped me in similar ways.
Although now I wish I didn’t have such fond memories of MZB.
Oh do I hear you. Her pedophilia is horrible and will never NOT be horrible. And it felt like such a betrayal… I cannot read anything by MZB ever again, because that’s all I can think of now when I get reminded she was the editor (her fantasy mag was my favorite) responsible for forming my sense that women were valuable, in an environment that told me that we are not.
I read Mists of Avalon before I read almost any other Arthurian retelling, and it had a major impact on how I viewed Arthurian myth (also that one scene with Lancelot and Arthur and Gwen was…important in a lot of ways). So it’s sitting on my shelf still but I feel like maybe it shouldn’t be, and I’m not sure I can or should ever read it again.
And the fact that she molded a lot of the female fantasy authors I read and gained confidence and feminism and non-normative-ness from. Ugh.
My understanding that gay people existed crystallized courtesy of Moreta by Anne McCaffrey, when it mentioned two dragonriders with truncated names were lovers. And I thought “wait, if they both have apostrophes in their names, they’re both men!” And then I just thought “huh, that’s cool,” and continued to read. Those books were followed by Last Herald Mage and Darkover. Since my mom had gotten me hooked on all of them, I guess that was her way of saying “gay people exist and that’s just fine!”
I seriously thought that with my mom too, especially because Vanyel was her favorite, and NOOOOOPE. I was invited to be straight or find a new place to live, when I tried coming out to her.
oh gosh I just remembered the time I was in the big-kids section of the library, age 9 or so, and on the other side of the shelf a librarian was advising a mom about Judy Blume, and she said “I recommend these for a young girl, but probably not Then Again, Maybe I Won’t.” I got pretty indignant for a second and considered going around the corner to say I’M a young girl and I LIKED that book! At which point it occurred to me that maybe all that stuff I didn’t really understand was…wrong, in some way…
I am very glad I didn’t say anything because it may have prompted A Talk.
I feel like I read this…? In like, middle school? *squints trying to remember*
My MS library was amazing and had pink hair. Everyone loved her.
My extremely conservative mother micro-managed my television and movie viewing, but seemingly did not care at all about the books I read (unless the title was obviously bad). I read a lot of age-inappropriate books.
I did hide The Scarlet Letter underneath my mattress because I thought I would be banned from reading it. I assumed it would be full of sex, but it wasn’t.
I read The Horse Whisperer when I was 13 or so because teen girls and horses, come on. I remember that the movie came out soon after and I expressed surprise to my mother that it was only a PG-13 rating (and therefore something I could watch). She of course got her mom senses up and asked why it would be R-rated. I told her because of the violence against horses.
Finally, when I was 17, I was reading a book about feminism. I have no idea what it was, but feminist/feminism was in the title. I got called into a sit-down meeting with my mother, my grandmother, and my pastor because clearly I was headed down the Devil’s Path. (I was.) They made me take the book back to the library.
I feel like I should have been banned from my mom’s Clan of the Cave Bear books, but then again my grandmother read them and opined that “I like them, but Ayla seems unrealistic- how could one person invent horseback riding, and archery, and all those other things?” so maybe they just didn’t care about the copious soft-core scenes?
Oh wait, I just remembered that my mom *wanted* to ban me from reading Berenstain Bears books, because she thought they were badly written and badly illustrated (she was a children’s librarian and preschool teacher by trade) but didn’t have the heart to tear me away.
Whoo boy. I was reading Christopher Pike in 4th grade, quickly followed by VC Andrews, Marion Zimmer Bradley (more Darkover though, I never could quite get through Mists of Avalon), and Clan of the Cave Bear. My mom read the Dragonriders of Pern books to me, although she skipped over a lot of the sexing (and the slapping).
However, I WAS forbidden to watch You Can’t Do That on Television.
I sadly never had any books forbidden but I wish I had these ripped from my hands and burned
1. Villette – Never again.
2. The Cement Garden – I’m still scarred.
3. Old Man and the Sea – Burn all of Hemingway’s works and just replace with dick pics. No one would even notice the difference.
Was this because the last freaking page of Villette just swooped in and emotionally scarred you forever, or did you just hate the whole thing?
YES THE LAST PAGE. OMG! I’m still pissed about it.
At least Jane Eyre the sweet ending pays off all the drudgery and tears
The Cement Garden–I kinda loved it. But disturbing for sure…
It was really haunting. so its a good book. But troubling…. I think I also watched the film around the same time :/ (art school library)
Ugh, The Cement Garden. A writing instructor told me a story I was working on made me think of it, so I forced myself through it and didn’t know whether to barf, cry, or give up writing forever.
My dad tried to forbid me from reading Slugs by Shaun Hutson aged approximately 13 because of the sex scenes in it. I think I refused to accept that it was forbidden and carried on reading it, but I can’t confirm this because all of Shaun Hutson’s books were very similar(ly bad) and it may have been a different one I read instead.
very little reading policing in my house, but here’s a story. In high school, I was in Book Club (my high school had a book club) and my parents agreed to split the price of books I bought for it, but they WOULD NOT pay for Catcher in the Rye, they helped me get it out from the library instead. Looking back, yeah, fair enough mom and dad.
I don’t recall ever having my reading material limited. Like many of you, I read everything I could get my hands on.
My parents did restrict my tv and movie consumption, largely because anything even the slightest bit scary would give me screaming nightmares, and then NOBODY in the house got any sleep.
Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers (“Probably a little too violent and too sexual” — my dad) when I was 14. For some reason, by 15 Stephen King was OK and my mom bought me The Stand. (And The Tommyknockers is probably his worst book, so thank you dad.)
I think the Shit Weasel (Dreamcatcher) novel gives Tommyknockers a run for worst King book. But your dad was right on.
Lisey’s Story is worse than the shitweasels. And at least Tommyknockers had the rad lady with the dolls. She tried!
He was super high when he wrote Tommyknockers. Like woah.
True. But High As Shit Stephen King is better than Cranky Grandpa Doesn’t Need an Editor Stephen King, sad as that is to say.
The only thing I was ever explicitly banned from reading was, at age 13, “Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal,” by Christopher Moore. My mother saw me reading her copy, and swooped in and promised I could read it at 18. I immediately reclaimed the book and skim-read the entire thing the next time she was out of the house, and was pretty amused and also kind of touched–like, the conceit works, and also it starts out with Biff’s buddy “Josh” resurrecting lizards, so that’s great. (I think I missed all the parts of sex and masturbation. I was reading fast.) My mother did follow through and give me my very own copy on my 18th birthday, by which point it was no longer quite as deliciously forbidden or sacrilegiously funny, /sigh.
I also was handed “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” with a raised eyebrow and a comment from my mother that she was pretty uncomfortable with the teen sex in it, but that I could read it, and I think I uncomfortably skimmed it in haste. Fortunately she never opened the really explicit historical novel about Lucrezia Borgia I checked out from the library in middle school, or “The Birth of Venus,” which was also a very sexy Italian Renaissance historical novel that one of my aunts gave me, I think under the assumption that I was interested in art history and that this was a good fit.
Lamb is such a good book! Glad you did get to read it after all.
Harry Potter was forbidden but I sneaked almost all of them in from the library and read them instead of studying for the ACT. After I got my scores back, I told my mom, and then she really didn’t care.
My mom was actually always fighting with the teachers at my school about giving me more advanced stuff to read, so I was really surprised when she actually did ban me from reading something: a trashy bio of Grace Kelly. Of course, I promptly absconded with her copy and read it while hiding under the bed. All I really remember about it is some story about how Grace was “highly sexed” and liked to dance naked to Hawaiian music (????) I think I finally put it back and went back to reading fantasy novels.
I snuck my mom’s copies of Clan of the Cave Bear and the next two books in the series when I was…12 or 13? Old enough to know just enough about what was going on, anyway. Also I read Stranger in a Strange Land when I was working my way through my dad’s sci-fi shelf around that age. I was not old enough to read that book.
Oh! Also when I was a freshman in high school my dad’s friend (a Christian Brother!) gave me a giant bag of Piers Anthony books. WHAT.
The only book-related one I remember is that my mom told me that I could skip “Lord of the Flies” for my Junior Great Books group if I chose to, because she worried it would be too upsetting. That just made me want to read it more, so I read it anyway.
BUT siblings and I were forbidden from watching “The Love Boat” and (of all things) “Golden Girls” due to what my parents perceived as inappropriately sexual (?) content.
I don’t remember anything being banned, except once when I was about 14 I asked for Like Water for Chocolate for Christmas and my mum thought it wasn’t “appropriate” so she got me a children’s trilogy about growing up in Northern Ireland instead. I have read neither that nor LWFC to this day.
LWFC does have some (literally) incendiary sex scenes though.
I had to study LWFC in Spanish when I was 17. It’s a good book, but lots of sexy bits (some, as mentioned, literally incendiary, some on horseback(??)), which made reading it with my 60-something year old teacher quite interesting. The film was not less awkward, but still good.
My Spanish class did this too. We were lazy and bought the English copy and passed it around. Better than the rest of the crap we had to read that year.
I was reading Judith Tarr’s Alamut (crusade-era historical fiction with a dash of fantasy) around age 8 or 9 and my mom realized after I was about halfway in, and panicked because there was sex in it (which I knew, because I had already read past some of it). She tried to take the book away, and I argued with her because I was way too far into the book already and she couldn’t do this to me because I needed to know what happened!
So about a week later, she let me have the book back and since I literally grew up in my dad’s used bookstore and could lay hands on basically anything I wanted anyway, we never talked about reading restrictions again. But I think I turned out okay.
I BEGGED my parents to read Anne Rices’s vampire novels. I was super into spooky gothic shit and was convinced that they would be amazing. I think I was given permission at age… 12 or 13? Which was obviously much too early and look at how bizarre I turned out as a result.
I read them at around that age. I’d say i got most of the gay subtexts, and I suspect it’s why I’ve never found vampires sexy.
I was allowed to read the books but not watch the films, and that was completely the wrong way round.
I was never banned from reading books, but I was briefly banned from listening to the album Demon Days by Gorillaz at about age 11, because I wouldn’t stop listening to Fire Coming out of a Monkey’s Heads, because it terrified me.
The only time I can ever remember my parents telling me not to read something (and I wouldn’t say they FORBADE it) was my mother’s romance novels. She was really into Beatrice Small, and I think I must have been about 13? She didn’t forbid it so much as say “oh, you shouldn’t read those till you’re a bit older”. But then I snuck one anyway, and read it, and when she found out she just shrugged and said “don’t tell your Dad!”
Otherwise they pretty much let me read what I wanted. I was an advanced reader (I think I read LOTR for the first time in like 5th grade for fun), and my mother made a point of giving me and my sister lots to read; she actively sought out books with female leads and better diversity, etc. This is something I didn’t realize she ACTIVELY did until I was an adult, as a kid I just thought all books were awesome and diverse and had lady leads like that. THANKS MOM!! (Especially for Tamora Pierce.)
I think my mom picked out Tamora Pierce for me too! Not knowing what she was getting me into, of course.
The Lovely Bones! I was 13 and on a family camping trip and my cousin was going to lend me The Lovely Bones. But my aunt made me call home to get my mom’s permission. My mom, who normally didn’t care what I read, was afraid of my aunt would think, so she told me I wasn’t allowed to read it.
But then again, my mom bought me a collection of romance novels at Sam’s Club around the same time. I had no idea they were romance novels, I just wanted to read “three stories of Irish magic!” Somehow that was more scaring than The Lovely Bones could ever be.
I saw Wicked the musical at… maybe 8? We bought the book for my brother, who is seven years older than me. I was forbidden to read it. Of course, I stole it from my brother’s room in the dead of night. I read it under the covers by way of flashlight, staying awake into the wee hours of the morning.
By the end my mind swam with one thought. WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST READ. There’s… a lot of politics. And like, a magic sex cult? Also… sentient animals having sex? I blocked most of it out, but did go back to read it several years later. It’s a good book, just… NOT FOR 8 YEAR OLDS.
I think I was freaked out by that book when I DID read it sometime in Middle School or High School. I don’t know; I read it in a haze of checking out all of Gregory MacGuire’s books during one summer.
The only time my parents ever gave any input on my childhood watching/reading habits:
Mom: I’m not sure I want you watching Ren & Stimpy.
7yo me: I don’t like it anyway, it’s gross.
Fin.
My grandpa was a middle school principal and on the school district committee re: book challenges. So, none, I was allowed to read all books and whenever a parent challenged a library book, my grandpa bought me a copy.
Your grandpa is a hero.
My parents didn’t forbid me from reading anything I wanted. I had read through the entire ‘young adult’ section of my local library by grade 6. But I grew up in a house with no TV and the movies I was allowed to watch were heavily censored. Which means that although I was a pre-teen girl when Titanic came out, I have never to this day seen it. I also don’t understand a lot of pop-culture Simpsons references. But I read the entire LotR in grade 4, and Clan of the Cave Bear in grade 5.
My friend and I weren’t forbidden from reading The Outsiders in sixth grade, but our book review of it was censored from the elementary school “newspaper.” My mom took me out of school & out to lunch to explain it to me.
I never had any books thereof that were forbidden for me to read. I think I can chalk it up to the innocence of times and partially living in small-town midwest with its modest sense of decorum. I was much more controlled by what I could and could not watch on TV. Specifically, I was a huge fan of wrestling shows at the time and my parents hated it. I had to do some sneaky stuff just to watch it. Good times.
My mom was Southern Baptist and had a big thing about witches and ghosts and demons and didn’t want me to read anything that featured any of those things, but I love scary stories. My reading level was higher than my age and maturity level, so a lot of what I wanted to read was not appropriate, according to my mom. She got angry with the librarian for allowing me to check out scary books, but the librarian basically said, “I’m not going to stop her from checking out anything in the elementary school library.” Mom got over it and stopped monitoring my book choices, which is how I read the Clan of the Cave Bear series in 7th grade.
Also, my bookworm aunt told me that I shouldn’t read Salem’s Lot because it scared her so much at 13 that she wore a cross around her neck for a year afterward even though she’s an atheist. I went and got that book immediately and was very disappointed.
like many commenters, my parents subscribed to the school of minimal interference on the literary front.
I wish though, that they had not let me read The Mists of Avalon in third grade. I was a precocious child, but I think I was forever scarred.
My parents never took away a paper book from me but they did have a sit-down talk to inform me I was banned from visiting www dot newgrounds dot com when I was in maybe 5th or 6th grade. Like many parents in the 90s they were extra paranoid about The Internet, where Everyone is Gonna Learn Your Address And Getcha.
My mom threw away my copy of Angela’s Ashes when I was sixteen and right in the middle of it. Also, Harry Potter.
Whhhhhhaaaaaaaat but Angela’s Ashes is GREAT
– The Chronicles of Narnia (magic not ok for a long time in my house)
– the Addy books from American Girls (depictions of slavery judged too disturbing)
– a book called Greensleeves, I forget who by (sexual content)
These are the ones I distinctly remember. Looking back it seems like an odd list.
As with many, my parents didn’t really forbid me to read anything. My dad doesn’t read books, he inhales them, so he was at the library at least once a week & I could ask him to pick me up anything. Didn’t forbid Jaws (which I read when I was 11 & probably shouldn’t have). Both my parents actively and regularly suggested Breakfast of Champions, which was wonderful because I finally understood what I thought was their in-joke about stealing mirrors. The only time I can remember them balking was with A Clockwork Orange, but a couple of friends had chosen it as our 10th grade group book report so I had the “but it’s for school” excuse right in hand.
Now, you wanna know who *did* gatekeep my reading? My older sister. She’s almost exactly 5 years older than me, and as a result of typical younger sister worship of her older sister I wanted to read everything she had on her bookshelf. I started reading the MythAdventures series when she was about 5 books in; I can only tell you I was younger than 9. Around the same time, she totally suggested Madeline L’Engle’s books, but wouldn’t let me read Many Waters because *that* was the book that was beyond me (I still haven’t read that one, actually). She read The Eyes of the Dragon for a 6th grade book report & refused to loan me her copy when I was in 4th grade (ostensibly because she thought I wasn’t ready for it, but by the time I nabbed it from her room & replaced it with a different book with black binding and red lettering–that is, about a year after her initial refusal–I felt that I totally could have handled it the year before. (And, I’d like to point out, this was also after about two years of keeping me entertained by playing The Eyes of the Dragon the way most kids would play Star Wars. One of us would be Flagg & try to come up with obscure ways to poison kings without getting caught, and the other one would have to run an investigation & not get framed. Typing this all out, I’m realizing a lot of ways my sister is responsible for the weirdo I’ve become.) And years later she wised up and hid her copy of Trainspotting so I couldn’t get at it after I asked to borrow it (I was in 8th or 9th grade by then).
To be fair, Many Waters is MUCH MUCH more adult than the entire rest of the series. I learned quite a bit from reading that book sometime in late elementary school.
Me too. I was old enough at the time to understand what sex was, and that it caused babies to happen, but Many Waters did surprise middle-school me by describing sex as, like, a normal part of people’s everyday lives.
I was allowed to read pretty much anything, but was forbidden from playing Pokemon (or Digimon, or anything with a “-mon” suffix) and watching about half of Nickelodeon’s early-2000s programming (Hey Arnold!, Catdog, Rocket Power, etc.).
My (significantly) younger brother has no such prohibitions, and is an avid Pokemon fan. When asked about this shift in ideology, all my dad could come up with was “we thought it was evil or something.”
I found Gone With the Wind at my grandmother’s house when I was about 10, and she would wait until I set it down to do something and then hide it. I’d find it every time and read a little more. I think she finally let me actually finish it when i was 13 or so.
I went to the library by myself from an early age and my parents never really cared what I checked out, which is why I read Mists of Avalon at 11 and Middlesex in 7th grade. The only book I was ever forbidden to read was A Clockwork Orange at 12 or 13 and I remember having huge fights about that with my dad. But eventually he relented and gave the book to me on my 14th birthday.
My sister and I were always obsessed with Pride & Prejudice, so Mom gifted us Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife without reading it. About the time we got to Lydia describing Wickham’s “waggling” nether regions to the other Bennet girls, she got wise and hid it.
That is HILARIOUS.
My parents only forbade me from one book and I have no clue why my mom thought this, but I asked her if I could get this one book, she looked at it and saw ‘necromancer’ somewhere and promptly said no because ‘necromancers eat dead bodies’. Completely untrue but now I’ll never achieve my dreams of raising the dead, thanks mom.
There are books I SHOULDNT have been reading but mostly my parents didn’t care, I remember when the girl with the dragon tattoo movies came out and my dad was obsessed and I was like ‘oh yeah I read all the books a couple years ago’ (I was probably about 15 at the time) and he freaked out that they had let me read that without him knowing. Ironically, my aunt was the one who recommended the series.
My parents never forbade me to read anything, I don’t think (although I was an extremely sensitive child, so I think I got occasionally gently steered away from things they knew I couldn’t handle). But tv? Whoo, boy, was I banned from watching a lot of things on tv.
I <3 all of these comments!
My mother tried so hard to keep me away from her collection of the Pern books (because of teh sex). When I was 10, I found the YA Menolly series at the school library, brought them home and paraded them in front of her like “Oh yeah?” And I could literally see her Mom instincts and Fan instincts at war on her face. Finally she said, “Well, you have to start from the beginning.” and handed me Dragonflight. Good call, Mom.
There have been exactly 2 sets of books I was told not to read growing up: Harry Potter, when I was 11 and Anne Rice novels when I was 14.
Now, I was already a master of hiding books by the time I was 11, so I ended up reading the first HP book, for class no less, without my parents finding out. The next year, my 7th grade lit teacher went toe to toe with my step-dad and convinced them to let me read all of them at the time. By Christmas of 8th grade, I believe we had copies of all 3 or 4 books. And I had read the school copies.
Anne Rice was less banning and more “you should wait, because I know you’re going to read them anyway.” I had already read at least 2 by that point.
I was really good at hiding the sexier fantasy novels from them. Because I read a lot of them, including the Black Jewel novels. They were passed around a few of my friends like candy.
Hilariously, I think my 7th grade lit teacher was pissed at my parents for the HP book banning thing (I want to add that she used to work with my stepdad, so there’s history). She also wanted me to read books at my very high level…so she had me started on Michener historical novels at 12 while at the same time basically telling step-dad to fuck off with his insistence that I read Tom Clancy novels for her. I was a bit scared by a torture scene in Centennial, so thanks Ms. Smalley. BUT I still own most of Michener’s novels now? And they’re still some of my favs?
My mom kept accidentally recommending I read books that I probably shouldn’t have, because her memory apparenty has a blind spot for sex. Lonesome Doves was a fun one to read in 9th grade, let me tell you.
My mom made a very big deal about not ever limiting our reading, but then as soon as Flowers in the Attic appeared, she noped the hell out of that. I think she felt she could get away with not ever limiting our reading because as kids we were conservative enough to do it for ourselves (mostly true).
I also remember furtively reading some fantasy book literally in a closet, because I thought it was too sexy and my parents Would Not Approve if they found out I was reading it. Looking back, I’m pretty sure it was not at all that sexy, all things considered. I don’t remember alot of it, but I do remember that somebody smelling like cloves was super sexy (?) and so I have weirdly sexy feelings about cloves.
Never forbidden, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted me to read Forever had they known. Luckily for them, I was so innocent I had no idea what it was talking about!
I borrowed some “magic tricks for kids!” book from the library, but my dad said no, because magic. I retrieved it from the top of the fridge, where he’d “hidden” it, then got busted reading it.
Didn’t even learn any god damn magic tricks.
Also the whole Lion Witch and Wardrobe series was off limits because magic, or maybe because I should just read the Bible?
Pretty sure I grew up in a cult.
I was not allowed to read my mom’s book club copy of The Mists of Avalon at 14, but I read it anyway, and then was really, really offended at my high school orientation by the fact that our mascot was the centurion. Imperial rapists, I thought. But because I couldn’t confess to having read the novel I was unable to fully explain to my mom my desire to transfer to a different school district.
Oddly, same mom GAVE me a copy of As I Lay Dying when I was 14.
Huh. I put down Geek Love when I was 14 bc it was a little too much for me. I read a lot of Oprah’s book club recommendations, because my mom had them around the house, and I sort of wish someone had intervened to be like “Maybe here is a book where women don’t get raped?” But generally I had totally free reign to read whatever I wanted, and would usually just put stuff down if I didn’t get it.
I started reading pretty early, and at about 6 yrs old I recall my mom gently suggesting I wait to read “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret” until I was a bit older.
At 8, I was caught flipping through her copy of “The Female Eunuch”.
I started reading John Updike in my early teens, which made my dad visibly uncomfortable, but he only said, “Uhhhh, those can get…mature at times.” But didn’t forbid it!
My parents were bemused by my interest in ” The Female Eunuch” however my youth group advisors were slightly horrified that I was being encouraged to read it!
The only book I was ever forbidden from reading was Are You Alone In the House by Richard Peck. Read it anyway; depressingly accurate portrayal of law enforcement dealing with sexual assault. (Also: WTF, mom, Go Ask Alice was ok when I was 11 but that wasn’t? Ugh.)
I sneaked that book from my sister and scarred myself for life. Learn young, I guess.
I was never forbidden any books that I can remember (although we weren’t allowed to watch Married With Children, Roseanne, or MTV), but when I read And Then There Were None (Christie) in intermediate school and had nightmares, my father threatened to throw it (a school library book) in our wood stove, and my mother told me to read the Bible until I could sleep.
My parents never actually forbid any books. I started reading Sweet Valley High before third grade because I had finished all the Sweet Valley Twins books my school library had. I remember because I switched schools for third grade and the librarian wouldn’t let me check one of the them out and called my mom in for a conference. I was allowed to read whatever I wanted in the school library after that and just assumed that carried over to the public library, where I found the V.C. Andrews books.
My aunt gave me Jane Eyre for my 9th birthday. I didn’t read it until I was 10 or 11 but then abandoned Sweet Valley for the classics.
The first day of junior high the school sent home a permission slip for the Stephen King novels and my parents had a big fight about that. My mom thought that since Stephen King was too scary for her that I would have nightmares. My dad started yelling about censorship, which was pretty funny. I was allowed to check them out but didn’t because I had watched Pet Sematary a couple of years before and never told anyone. I don’t think I read Stephen King until I was 20.
Oddly enough I have a distinct memory in high school of my mom giving me a Dean Koontz book to read. I remember the plot but not the title and it doesn’t match any of the books on his Wikipedia page. It was about a girl who survived a house fire and was sent to live with her wealthy father and step-mother. She basically gas-lighted her sister into going crazy because she resented the sister for growing up rich. And there was a ghost? Whatever it was, I finished it in a day and mom didn’t believe I could read that fast. She made me give an oral book report on it since she thought I didn’t want to admit that it scared me and I didn’t finish it.
Sophomore or junior year of high school one of the other pastors at our church tried to forbid me from reading To Kill a Mockingbird. He took it away from me and handed me a Bible. I complained to my mom since I had a test that week and it was returned. He never tried to take a book from me again. Junior year my English teacher didn’t specifically assign The Handmaid’s Tale but included it on a list of three books we had to pick from. I had read the other two. I never took that one to church with me, I imagine the pastors would have burnt it.
Oh I forgot the most annoying story, when I was in grade 10 and the new school librarian looked at whatever book I had and suggested I didn’t read it because it was grade 11 level. No idea what the book was, but I still remember that monster’s name, especially as she replaced an awesome librarian.
My mom had a habit of forbidding any books we got too interested in- for me, that included Nancy Drew, The Saddle Club, Pony Pals, Archie Comics, and the Redwall series. She says she banned them because they weren’t exactly high art or something and I still think that’s a terrible excuse for cutting off your children’s interests. I was a pre-teen, I didn’t care that much for literary value.
Other than anything we spent too much time on, I don’t think we were specifically forbidden from reading anything. I did hide any books that seemed too sexy, but that was more of a preemptive strike.
REEEEEDDDWWAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!!!
EULALIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Aw dang the hares were the best
The only book that I can remember being gently advised to wait on was Wicked, which I wanted to read after seeing the musical for my 12th birthday. Probably a good thing because I’m pretty sure the book included all sorts of weird incesty sex stuff and bizzare religious stuff. I read the first few chapters anyway and decided that mom was probably right.
However, my mother had no problem with me stealing her Dragonriders of Pern books in like 5th grade and there is some serious sex going on in those. I also stole a good number of her historical novels and lady detective stories. And a lot of Sophie Kinsella novels which for some inexplicable reason feature way more whipped cream sex scenes than seems reasonable.
It very much includes weird incesty sex and bizarre religious stuff. Very much. Good job, Gregory MacGuire.
I was raised in a strict fundamentalist Christian church so we didn’t have a television nor were we allowed to go to movies. My reading habits, however, were totally unmonitored. Looking back, I am amazed at how neither of my parents showed any interest in what I was checking out of the library. Bless their little innocent hearts. Reading saved my life.
My parents never stopped me reading anything. In fact, I was explicitly given the run of all the books in the house when I was about 7. I think my mum suggested that I avoid my dad’s copy of The Silence of the Lambs, but I knew enough about it even then to know that I wouldn’t ever want to read it.
My school library kind of did, though. At the beginning of the year I had to read aloud to the teacher so they could assess my level, but they didn’t push me enough and just stuck me on a middling level. I read the book I picked to my mum that night and her only response was, “This is way too easy.” She wrote a stroppy note to my teacher and I got moved up a level, and that was when my love of Victorian/Edwardian children’s novels was born.
Just curious if you’ve ever read The Children’s Book by A S Byatt? It’s not for everyone, surely, but it may fit your interests.
I don’t think so, but I have a vague memory of trying one of her novels and hating it (Possession, maybe?). I’ll have a look, though, I’m in need of something to read. Thanks for the rec!
Possession is wonderful but it is not the most approachable Byatt by far.
First of all, I love that this post went up like an hour ago and already has 450 comments.
Second… I was not necessarily banned from reading anything, because I think my parents were so thrilled that I devoured books that they didn’t care too awfully much (although I had to wait until high school to read Sweet Valley High, so obv I smuggled them in and read them inside my closet). Once, though, I was reading a scary novel and told my dad it was scary – he is a huge practical joker so this was a BIG mistake. YUGE. He took it from me like he was going to read it out loud to me, and instead managed to make up an ending even scarier, and so scary that I had to sleep with the lights on for a week. My mother was Not Amused, and told my dad I shouldn’t bring scary books home, although that was more because of him than because of me.
My mom had Danielle Steele books that she hid in her nightstand and wouldn’t let me or my younger sister look at. So of course when she was at work or out shopping I’d take a peak and quickly skim to all the ‘exciting parts’. I still remember the weird flush of shame and interest, and “is that really what sex is like?” thoughts.
Shortly thereafter I got a job working at a library, and got to browse books with ‘interesting parts’ to my hearts content.
I don’t recall ever having been stopped from reading anything fiction-wise by my mum – I think she figured I would just gloss over stuff I didn’t understand. However, when I was ten she stopped me buying a magazine called Sneak because it had stuff about periods and sex in it (spoiler alert mum: I already knew that stuff).
I think my favourite childhood censorship story though was that my mum wouldn’t let me watch Power Rangers in case I tried to copy the violence (some kids had taken to playing a game sort-of based on it). I am… baffled by this. It was the only thing she wouldn’t let me watch (unless it was something with actual real violence or explicit sex). I never saw any of it until I was an adult but I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard as when I realised what she was protecting me from. It’s SO BAD.
My mother caught me putting Atonement back on the shelf one day when I was ten. I told her, “I skipped the part in the library, and also the part with the rude note.” I do not think this comforted her at all.
I was a precocious reader, and my parents were okay with whatever i was reading. Mostly. When I entered a (gasp) public high school they had a brief phase wherein they attempted to get involved. This meant my mother suddenly deciding that I should wear pastels, and my father taking Catch 22 away from me. Needless to say, they got bored of that phase pretty quickly. But I still haven’t read Catch 22.
In 8th grade, my mother sent me to (very Catholic) school with her favorite book at her age. That was quickly taken away by an angry nun for being ‘filth’. And proving that I come from a family of geeks, that book was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
We always wanted to read whatever my mother was reading, and that meant that in the 80’s, we all got into Stephen King and Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, plus some popular nonfiction of the era like Desmond Morris’s books. I remember getting into trouble about Wifey, which my mother thought was porn, but she didn’t try all that hard to keep it from us, as I recall. Some years later, she was surprised when I told her that Judy Blume’s YA books were controversial, as she’d assumed that pretty much anything YA would be fine for us to read; she never checked. I think the same thing happened with V.C. Andrews, which we girls all read for sure. My brother might have, but he’d never admit it. On the whole, it was never my parents who chastised me for the intellectual quality of what I read. Just my high school English teacher, sigh. She’s gone now, and I still happily read reams of smut and regret nothing. She got after me for reading Robert Parker during a free reading period. Good thing she didn’t know about the zillions of Sweet Valley High books that are still in my attic.
I let my kids pick their own books. Not much scares me. I remember the power of reading to let me resolve my own questions and problems without having to have embarrassing conversations with people, especially my parents, who were definite social liberals but who had been raised ashamed enough of sex to have a lot of trouble with it when it came to parenting matters. They were nearly always palpably trying to stay out of their own way when raising us, but my dad had three daughters and he just couldn’t help himself from wanting us to stay virgins until at least he died. It didn’t work out.
I picked up Game of Thrones when I was about twelve, and decided that I was too young for it right around when it got to Daenerys and Khal Drogo’s wedding night. I turned it back into the library and DEFINITELY did not tell my parents what I’d read.
I had totally forgotten about this by the time the HBO series came around and had really intense deja vu for the first few episodes before I remember I’d read part of the book a decade ago.
My library when I was growing up had shelves of romance paperbacks directly across the aisle from all the rock cassettes, so I could browse the cassettes and then furtively sneak home trashy romances, which my mom didn’t think were appropriate for me in seventh grade. Meanwhile at school, my librarian was handing me Francesca Lia Block and Anne McCaffrey and Clan of the Cave Bear.
And then when I was almost 14, my dad handed me Still Life With Woodpecker and told me it was his favorite Tom Robbins book. TBH, that was way more stuff that would have freaked my mom out than what was in Johanna Lindsey.
I searched all through the comments to find someone who mentioned Francesca Lia Block: I still think that the entire Weetzie Bat book series was a fever dream, and also maybe the reason Coachella is A Thing today (if a whole generation of children read her books which I’m not sure they did, but, ya know).
I am adopting this theory immediately.
The Reavers is a much better Faulkner novel for kids, but “Dead as a beef” will always be one of my favorite phrases in the history of literature.
I was never forbidden from reading anything, but my mother was not impressed by my idea to read Hamlet in 5th grade. I did not finish the play at that time.
I can’t remember my parents ever banning books, I think mostly because they didn’t want to be seen to be discouraging me from reading. I’m sure there were books that were kept on higher shelves than others, but at no point did they ever take a book from me and tell me not to read it.
They bought me Jaqueline Wilson’s “Girls In Love” series for my 9th birthday which felt so grown up (I was the only girl in my class ‘allowed’ to read them at that point) but with hindsight that series covered some really heavy stuff.
I actually had to beg my mum not to read the Wideacre trilogy after I’d finished them, because I could not stand the idea of me knowing she’d read some of those passages or her knowing that I’d read them…
When I was maybe 10 or 11, I was devouring this series of YA biographies of famous women. When I checked out the one on Betty Friedan, my parents got these disapproving looks on their faces and said the only way I could read it was if I sat down and had a Talk with my mom afterwards.
Presumably so she could tell me that while it was okay to read about and admire famous women who did good things, feminism was not in that category. I do not recall either reading the book or having the Talk.
I don’t think my parents ever forbade me from reading something, but my grade school librarian refused to let me check out Jacob Have I Loved when I was in 6th or 7th grade. Still don’t understand why. I also don’t understand why she was a school librarian when she hated books and children. Mysteries. . .
Also, I went through a really big fantasy stage when I was a teenager. Dragonlance, Forbidden Realms, all your multipart epics with lots of swordfights and inaccurate, overblown sex scenes (case in point: in one book a male character tells a female character after he takes her virginity something like, “The first time is the best time. It’s great other times you have sex, but your first time is the best.” INCORRECT.) My friends used to steal my books and search through until they found the sex scenes, at which point they would read the scene out loud to anyone who was around, including teachers and parents. I get why they did it now, but at the time I was just like, “I am NEVER showing anyone what I read EVER!”
I wasn’t allowed to read Sweet Valley High because my mom “didn’t like their lifestyle”
My mom would never let me check out Series of Unfortunate Events books because she thought they were “too dark and sad.”
“That’s kinda the point, MOM,” quoth 11 year old me.
I remember very sneakily flipping through my mom’s copy of Disclosure to read the sexy parts
My parents just had a genralized fear of me sneaking books from their grown-ups bookshelf (that was located in my brother and I’s bedroom?) or the library- a fear that as I recall started out grossly exaggerrated, then became self-fulfilling. The two I remember reading are both somewhere from 12 to 14- a library copy of Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, which I loved at the time, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I LOATHE to this day along with its series and author by extension.
This is going to be buried forever, but my no-saint-like-an-old-sinner quasi-reformed hippie mother bought me a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves when I hit puberty, but then stapled together all the “dirty” wherein dirty = sex, lesbians, abortions, masturbation, and anything else I probably should’ve learned about from a source other than my dad’s Penthouses.
I don’t recall be forbidden anything, as my parents were part free-range and part just didn’t care. But my Dad did make himself known as to his opinions on the books I chose. He was particularly snide regarding the Wizard of Oz books and the Babysitters Club. I read them anyway.
(Dad also hated Judy Blume and I’ve never actually read any. I always think I shall get around to it, because I have the strong rebellious streak rebellious streak of an adult who didn’t rebel as a teenager, but I never do. I keep reading non-fiction like a boring adult.)
From about age 3 to 10, I lived with my Jewish grandma and she didn’t have kids books, so I read whatever I could reach on her shelf… All the racy stuff. However, when I went to live with my Pentecostal mother, that changed. I couldn’t read anything secular (satanic, they called it), so I read the Living Bible, and all the brain-washing Christian stuff out in the 70’s (The Christian teen, Don’t sin, etc) By the time I was 13, I was sneaking bodice rippers and John Jakes and Hawthorne from the library – and the clerk there would totally try to censor me.
My mom didn’t want me to read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret or the Diary of Anne Frank when I was either 8 or 9. I read them on my own, of course, and that was the last time my parents tried to limit my reading.
My mom, who’s a voracious reader, read a lot of my books and talked with me about the ones that were “about things older than I was” and that worked pretty well. She didn’t like sf/f so she missed some of the more horrifying things my brother and I read, like the Thomas Covenant series.
My brother and his wife told their daughter she had to wait until she was 9 to read the last three Harry Potter books, but she wore them down and finished the whole series when she was 8 and that was the last I’ve heard of them limiting her reading.
I wasn’t raised by my parents so much as fed and passed back and forth between them after they divorced, so zero supervision of reading material. Then married into fundamentalist christianity and attempted to raise a son in the internet age with all my pendulum swinging need to fix my past. Thus tried to block everything from him and still failed.
Would be very interested to hear what growing up with the internet, supervised or unsupervised, was like for others.
We got the internet when I was in 5th grade, and my mom didn’t realize she needed to sensor us until it was too late (my dad only recently learned how to use the internet) and our computer kept getting viruses from porn pop-ups. I eventually learned to erase my search history. There were also a lot of chat boards that were pretty much full of creepy dudes trying to have internet sex talk with underage girls, but I tended to self-censor in those situations. TBH I worry about the prevalence of free porn with my kids, but I figure as long as there are examples of healthy relationships available (for instance, I have a small collection of women-friendly sexy comics), and that both my hubs and I talk to our kids about sex pretty early on, we should be able to avoid some of it. Right? RIGHT, everyone?
Around 11-12, my mom didn’t want me reading “trashy” adult sci-fi/fantasy (Mercedes Lackey, et al). Instead, she took me to buy some Modern Classics, which is why I read the following for fun in 7th grade: A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, The Once and Future King, To Kill A Mockingbird, and like…James Herriot’s entire “All Creatures Great and Small” series?
Also I already had read an ALARMING amount about sex stuff because I’d found a Nancy Friday book in my mom’s dresser and snoop-read it.
The James Herriot series! <3
When I was 10, there was a bookstore within walking distance of my house with a first floor that was entirely kids’ books, though YA in the early 90s amounted to basically one bookcase dominated by R. L. Stine, Christopher Pike and the Lurlene McDaniel books where kids are always dying of various diseases. My parents didn’t ban any books, like a lot of others here, but one time my mom got curious about what I was reading and asked to read one of my books. I knew she might have an issue with the Christopher Pike books and all their sex and drinking and reaaaally detailed descriptions of teenagers’ breasts, so I gave her an L. J. Smith book to read because there was basically nothing racier in those than intense kissing.
My mom told me that The Giving Tree promoted unhealthy, codependent relationships. I read it as an adult and honestly she has a point.
She also cancelled MTV after she saw Axl Rose wearing a homophobic tshirt. Like, good job but I wish I’d been able to watch Daria.
The only books I was ever forbidden were all of Enid Blighton’s oeuvre, which my mother found disgustingly racist, sexist, and generally regressive. #stricthippy
I was not forbidden to read anything as a child, probably because I read too fast for adults to stop me before I had finished the book.
However, I probably should have been prevented from reading some of the stuff I got my hands on.
Same. I read things I really shouldn’t have very young. But, really, I didn’t fully understand them so I don’t think any damage was done.
It me
SO GOOD. This whole thread.
I actually read the second book in the FITA series first (17 year old girl seduces much older foster father and then marries her brother) and then read Flowers and holy shit that was awful. My parents only censored me from reading books they had read, so I was allowed to read The Green Mile (NOPE) but not The Horse Whisperer (because of the sex scene). I definitely read too-old-for-me books (Schindler’s List in 8th grade, Go Ask Alice at any age…) but I didn’t censor myself at all. I was always surprised at the books that made it into my junior high library (VC Andrews, some weird vampire series with lots of almost-sex). This list is making me reminiscent of my youthful illicit reading!
I was forbidden to read Enid Blyton. That is all.
My mother was a librarian, and we had the run of all sections of the library. I read a lot of Wilbur Smith at the age of ten, which was a bad idea, and all sorts of other stuff, but this was South Africa in the seventies, so it was all was pretty tame. I got into trouble at school for reading Richard Bach’s Illusions.
Then my mother died and we moved to Canada when I was thirteen, and I read everything, and then some. The library saved my life, even though I read a lot of rubbish, like Dianetics, Holy Blood and Holy Grail and Earth in Upheaval.
But I still haven’t read any Enid Blyton.
You have to read Blyton before age 7 or it’s awful
That’s kind of what I thought.
I found out recently through the Guardian that the whole “contempt for Enid Blyton because she has no literary merit” was a whole thing, at just about the time my mother would have gone to library school, so that kind of puts that in context, I guess. I was a bit disappointed to realise it wasn’t just my mother’s own unique quirk.
I was allowed to read Elinor M Brent Dyer, though, whose books I LOVED. WORSHIPPED AND LOVED. They have no more literary merit than Enid Blyton, but they do have loads of lesbian subtext (I have no idea whether my mother knew that, but I would not be that surprised if she did).
Oh man, this comment thread is everything I could ever want from the Internet.
Like several others, the only books my parents outright banned were the Sweet Valley High books- but once my third grade teacher called my mom out for practicing CENSORSHIP, I was allowed access to the books. I’m pretty sure there was mention of the Chinese government’s media censorship and how communism is an interesting idea but difficult to practice perfectly. At any rate, I was then given free rein over what I wanted to read- and I read everything I encountered. Lots of Dick Francis, Agatha Christie, P.D. James, other mass paperback mysteries.
For a hot minute (maybe three months?) when I was about 12 I was really interested in getting all the “lost\wayward teen girl discovers Christianity and is saved” themed books our library had. I remember hearing my dad express his concern that I was going to be brainwashed by those books. No worries dad, my next reading obsession was some fantasy book (“Catswold? Maybe??) with a portal, from somewhere in the English countryside to another world where people turned into cats and had lots of sex and rolled up Cleopatra-style into carpets. Did anyone else read that? What was it? I def read it before I had a solid understanding of human sex and it was…perplexing?I was seriously captivated by it though.
BOOKS! I love the books. I also love The hyphen Toast dot net. Thank you for being.
My parents were particular about what I watched on TV, some of it because they hated it and thought it was stupid and grating (Ed, Edd, and Eddy), and some of it because it seemed too “mature” (Degrassi, watched by 9-10 year old me). But I don’t recall them ever once limiting the books I read in any way.
:cries for having no time to read this surely wonderful post today:
My parents were actually totally lax on books, operating under the assumption that anything that was “too grown up” would bore me and I’d naturally put it aside, and my mom’s full confidence that I would ask her ANYTHING. (This was never, ever the case, Mom.) They were stricter on TV and movies, only for me, not my brother, although I guess I brought that on myself by having a complete freak-out the first time I learned about the ten plagues of Egypt and the Angel of Death. Like, went from kid who’d never minded the dark to sleeping with a nightlight for the next eight years, and frequently stopping on the outside steps with a compulsion to scrape myself or pick open a scab or something so the Angel of Death would leave my brother alone.
And they “let” me keep reading Baby-sitters Club books as long as I read “real books” as well. I guess my mom did prevent me from reading any similar series, less for moral reasons and more for not wanting to commit to another never-ending series taking over the shelves.
I still wonder a bit about her letting me read Mists of Avalon when I was seven, though.
I never read the VC Andrews oeuvre, but at the moment I am ADDICTED to reading snarky plot summaries and recaps, so any links?
Our elementary school librarian was a whole other story–I mentioned my dad was reading me Watership Down and she literally screamed in my face that it was an incredibly inappropriate book for children, she forbade a sixth-grade friend of mine from checking out Little Women because it was “too adult.” (The school only went to sixth grade!) She thought my brother reading Greek and Roman mythology was “demonic” and she wouldn’t let me look at the big dictionary during free library time, because she seemed to assume no kid would ever page through the dictionary for fun except to find dirty words.
eta: by and large though, sex scenes just made me feel uncomfortable and kind of still do (or they just make me roll my eyes/laugh). So I wasn’t really trying to find sex stuff.
My mom took Leaves of Grass away from me and my sister, not because the book had anything wrong with it, but because us giggling about I Sing the Body Electric meant we were not mature enough for Whitman yet. Reasonable call, mom.
Nothing was forbidden for me and I don’t forbid/judge anything my daughter chooses to read.
But if she ever shows up with a copy of Less Than Zero I will fold. I read that as a 38 year old woman of the world and was emotionally scarred. Jesus.
A) I love Toasties this thread is the best
B) My parents have always been wary about violence in media but 100% A OK with sex, swearing, drugs and whatever else. So in my house police procedurals were ‘adult shows’ and Monty Python’s oeuvre complete with frequent nudity was family viewing. Once we asked mum why we weren’t allowed to swear but were allowed to sing along to sweary Pogues songs, and the answer was “because you’re kids, but you need to understand that its shit being Irish”
I still give my mom crap about my 14th birthday, when my dad gave me the Anne Rice books I’d asked for and Mom promptly took them away. After a few weeks of waiting for her to back down I just went into her closet and got them; I don’t think I even ended up reading them all before I got bored.
The only other book I remember having censored was The Good Son, which my favorite teacher gave me in 8th grade after I helped clean out her classroom. I had already read it once by the time my mom realized there was an R-rated movie based on it and made me throw it out. I think I cried, not because I liked the book that much but because I was enough of a nerd that throwing any book in the trash physically pained me.
Like a lot of others here, my mom was way more vigilant about TV and movies. And by “vigilant” I mostly mean that if the Parents Television Council or my grandmother didn’t like it, she’d ban it sight unseen. Books I had a lot more freedom over.
My mom recommended Flowers in the Attic to me when I was in FIFTH GRADE. What were you thinking, mom??
As far as I remember, my parents never stopped me reading anything, probably because they were both voracious readers when they were children and it was their escape so knew that I was most likely the same. They also knew that if they told me I couldn’t read something, that would make me want to read it so much more than if they hadn’t said anything.
Other side to this though was that, instead of giving me The Talk, my mum just gave me a book because, and I quote (from about two weeks ago) “we knew you would read about it anyway so it might as well have been from a book we’d picked”.
5th through 8th grade I was left home alone without my brother for brief periods of time. I would use this time to go to my mom’s section of childhood development books and surreptitiously read them. I’d stand by the front window to read them, so when I could see my mom’s car start to pull into the drive away I could put the book away, run across the house, and be back in my room before she finished opening the door. (I was allowed to be elsewhere in the house, but it wouldn’t have made sense because I always read my books in my room.) She never forbid me because I never asked, but I’m sure she would not have wanted me reading them. That’s how I read thinks like Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls and Some of My Best Friends Are Books (about gifted children, IIRC) and other books about dealing with gifted kids.
I monitored my own reading more than my parents ever did, usually unnecessarily. After seeing a news segment on Harry Potter & the outcry within the christian community (witchcraft!! oh my!!), I put them aside for at least a year. Later, I didn’t read the Percy Jackson books because I thought my parents would consider them heathen nonsense; my mom eventually bought me a copy of the first book herself.
I was a precocious and voracious reader born to neglectful liberals, and my mom got really into Harry Potter when she was scanning it for objectionable material, and then JK Rowling made a statement that she didn’t think we should censor what our children read, to which my mother said OH THANK GOD and stopped paying any attention at all, which I don’t think is exactly what Rowling meant.
So I was allowed to read literally everything, which was fine, except for when it wasn’t, at all, like when I learned from The Cider House Rules (it’s nothing at all like the movie, you guys!) what a blow job was and what bestiality was, because 12 is way, way, WAY too young to be reading John Irving.
My parents are foreign and I’m not sure they understood what was age appropriate reading. I was a voracious reader so my parents just kept giving me more books to read that in hindsight were both inappropriate and far too advanced for me. I’m not sure I understood any of it! For example, I read Jane Eyre in 2 days when I was 8 years old. What the hell? I also read every holocaust book I could get my hands on in the 4th grade and that was…not smart.
My mom confiscated The Diary of Ann Frank when I was on my 4th re-read in a row, worried I was becoming macabre.
I wasn’t allowed to read anything by Judy Blume or Christopher Pike or anything that might possibly, remotely have something sexual in it.
My mom used to check out my books from the library based on what she thought was appropriate. I remember one time she brought me a book about a teenager who was popular, but broke with the popular crowd to do her own thing. I think my mom was trying to teach me a lesson about peer pressure.
Unfortunately, the only part of the book that got through to me was one of the secondary characters. She was a fellow high schooler, but who had no friends and was bullied by the other kids. She ended up committing suicide. As a junior high student who had no friends and was bullied by the other kids, that got to me because *she* was the character I identified with. I cried buckets.
I should have just read the Judy Blume.
All the Pretty Horses. Because I was 9 and my parents had read it and knew that it was, in fact, not about ponies in the way I thought it was.
But my parents weren’t at all familiar with fantasy, so when I read Mists of Avalon when I was 10, they were only horrified years later, when I told them the kind of shit that went down in that book.
I wasn’t forbidden books, but I self-forbade “Willard and His Bowling Trophies” by Richard Brautigan. I was out of books of my own to read during free reading period, and my mom grabbed it at random off my dad’s shelf for me. I started reading it…and spent the rest of our reading time hunkered down in my desk in horror, sure that someone was going to realize I’d brought some sort of BDSM weirdness to MIDDLE SCHOOL.
I took it home and gave it back to my mother with a bashful “I don’t think I can read this.” She said, “Don’t be silly, of course you can.” “No, I really cannot. Certainly not at school. Read this.” “Don’t be ridicu-” “LOOK AT IT.”
So at last she did. She looked at the table of contents, and that alone was enough to make her realize what she’d given me. We never spoke of the book again, though I did dig it back out in high school so my best friend could do dramatic readings from it while I made sound effects on my keyboard.
My grandmother owns a used bookstore and my summer “job” was helping her sort the romance, mystery and western sections. I opted out of a lot of mystery series because they were too scary, but I fell in love with cozy mysteries. I also recall stealing books while I sorted the romance section and reading naughty parts when I got home, but then I had to sneak them back in the next day.
I still read a lot of romance on my Kindle, but I always get hit by a wave of nostalgia when I see a dog-eared 1980s romance with holographic type and frightening muscles.
My cousin Rosie is four years older than me and my cousin Sally is two years older, and at some point they put their heads together and decided that no one in our family should read D.H. Lawrence, ever. I was at the age where I read everything, so I put up some resistance to being told that “we” did not read D.H. Lawrence, and asked why. Rosie yelled, “PHALLIC BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE” and refused to say more. I still don’t know whether this was something she found in a D.H. Lawrence book, or in a work of literary criticism, or what. But somehow it stuck. To this day, I haven’t read a single book by D.H. Lawrence, though I now hold two degrees in English Literature.
I have not, either, and I have a master’s degree in British modernism
My parents didn’t forbid any reading material. Including my mom’s romance novels. And a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale I found while babysitting when I was fourteen.
I remember my mother was appalled by commercial YA series – there was one called Fearless that I borrowed some of the early books from a friend but my mom wouldn’t get me any of the subsequent books – she wanted me to read Jane Eyre instead. Which I did and it’s FINE but… it didn’t have the trashy pleasure of the YA series.
Anne Rice, The Mummy. I was eight, and I loved everything Egyptian.
My mom was a wise woman.
Books were never forbidden. If I was too young to understand something, my mom or teacher would help me out. Ah, the days before the net. TV, however, was highly censored. I remember sneaking downstairs to watch Python on PBS. Such a rebel.
No parental censorship of my reading to speak of, but:
When Flowers in the Attic did the rounds when I was 11 or 12, my friends basically told me I wasn’t allowed to read it. I was known for being a serious Christian (in Australia – that read differently than it might somewhere in the US?), and they basically told me it wasn’t going to be my bag. I didn’t experience it as exclusion – I thought of it at the time (still do!) as an act of kindness and respect. It’s probably also the case that knowing that good-girl ‘k’ had read it would have spoiled the illicit thrill? But – two things can be true, and all that 🙂
What’s particularly entertaining to me in retrospect is that while they were right that adolescent incest fantasies were not going to be my kinda thing, I had a pretty clear line of sight on the range and variety of family violence, child abuse and neglect as a result of having unimpeded access to Mum’s social work textbooks. Stuff that I think would still shock a lot of those friends, and we’re in our 30s now!
Like every other Toast reader, I read voraciously throughout my kidlethood. My grandpa used to regularly buy me whole cartons of second-hand books at garage sales (I think the American term is “yard sale”) and nobody ever checked what was actually in the cartons, as far as I remember. The only one of the carton-books my dad ever took away from me was a copy of The Happy Hooker, which I was covertly reading at age 10-ish. Which, yeah.
My mom gave me a few of the Baby-Sitters Club books from a resale shop in 1998 when I was 8. She was pretty cool about buying them for me when she could find them until I was about 10 and she was all “You have an entire shelf full of these books. You need to stop.” But then I just moved onto Sweet Valley High. She was cool with this, apart from saying “Just let me know if there’s any sex stuff in them.” I replied, (with some disappointment), “Mo-om, All they do is kiss.”
I also know I was given Gone with the Wind around 13 and read it in about five days.
My dad always read to me, from the day I came home from the hospital as a newborn. When I was toddler age, my little sister and I would stay up late for him to come home from work (he was an editor at the newspaper and would come home at midnight, so from the time I was an infant, my sleep schedule was screwed) and we’d go down the hallway to his bathroom and slip books under the door and wait for him to come out and he’d just pick up the books and sit us down in his lap and read to us until the pile was gone. No one ever taught me or my sister how to read, we just picked it up.
Though, talking about filthy books, my mom had some weird things in her bedside table. There was one about lesbian nuns (she’s Catholic) and one called The Pearl which was apparently some erotica magazine in Victorian England? All I know is I was reading it at like…12 and there was a scene with underage girl-on-girl peeing for the pleasure of some older man.
I also distinctly remember talking to my mom about the second Princess Diaries book (I was 11/12) where Mia’s mom comes in and tells Mia she’s pregnant and that Mia was all “My mom is having my algebra teacher’s baby.” and my mom hastened to tell me that “You should be married to have a baby”.
Like many others, my parents banned Sweet Valley High. I read one furtively in the library and decided they were boring anyway.
My high school teacher, who, in my final year, said I couldn’t borrow a book (I forget which one) until I was older. I pointed out that no-one at the school would ever be older than me, so it could never be borrowed. She checked the book out to me. 😀
Well, I did lots of self-monitoring (gave away my copy of The Giver once I read about Jonas’s sexual stirrings only to repurchase a used copy to then give away again; stopped reading Robin McKinley’s Hero and the Crown when I realized she was having sex; this happened a lot).
My mom wouldn’t let me read BSC because Mary Anne had a boyfriend or SVH because they were about girls and boys dating, and she thought Rebecca looked too much like a romance novel for me to read when I was 12 (even though one of my teachers suggested I read it). And she wouldn’t let me read Jane Eyre until I was 14 because she thought it was too mature.
In 5th grade I decided I needed to be reading something more impressive. So I set out to read all of Shakespeare. Only I refused to read any lines from male characters. Hamlet was confusing. But I liked it more then than I did when I read it in high school soooo….
My mom was not big into the forbidding thing (she saw me reading Clan of the Cave– no, it was Island of the Horses, I found it at the cabin we stayed at one summer– anyway, she went “Doesn’t that have sex in it?” and when I widened my eight-year-old eyes and said “I just skip those parts,” she said “Huh ok” and let me get on with it) but she did forbid me, in middle school, to read The Mists of Avalon, not because of the sex but because it was “too sad.” So I kept her copy under my pillow in my room, and the school library copy in my desk at school, and managed to slog through the whole damn thing in secret because I had a decoy book to read in the car. Apparently “this book was personally triggering for me for some reason” is more of a reason to censor your child’s reading than “this book is at least 40% actual porn and my child has literally not turned nine yet.”
At one point I somehow came across a trashy paperback about a young lady doing it with an android butler. I was about 12 and I brought it along to my grandma’s and I was like “this is repellent and also wonderful and I bet my face is scarlet, I should throw this book away.” I wonder what the heck it was and if it was really as bad as I remember!
It might have been Asimov’s “I, Robot.” One of the short stories had that plot.
No, it was not anything Asimov related because 1) It was slim-book-length, not a short story and 2) I would have known who Asimov was, I was raised on sci fi, and I distinctly remember this book as something super random from the very cheap bin at a used bookstore. This was traaaaash. And I just spent like 30 minutes googling robot smut to no avail 🙂
My dad forbid me from reading Girl With a Dragon Tattoo when I was in middle school. I don’t think I was even that interested in reading it, but it was EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN to me. Still haven’t read it. I was pretty deep into the world of smutty fanfiction by this point, so I doubt it really helped anything.
Like many here, my parents were super restrictive about television, music, and movies, but much more hands off about books, probably partly because I was too voracious a reader to keep up with and partly because I had the survival instinct necessary to be sneaky about everything I thought they might take issue with.
They did forbid comic books (though not for my brother, so this was a weird gender thing I think?) and the big illustrated book of disasters I always wanted from the library, both things that were harder to hide because of the large size format. I prevailed in both cases through sheer sneak, but they must have had some idea because they were open about their relief when I eventually got into The Baby Sitters Club books like a more “normal” girl person.
Weirdly, despite their being very religious morally conservative people, my bedtime stories were pretty liberal (if a little eclectic)? The Once and Future King, Feynman’s lectures, The Hobbit, the lineages of various royal families, et cetera
I couldn’t read Harry Potter (though I did finally finish them in secret aged 13) and the Never-ending Story, though I did read my mum’s copy of the Vagina Monologues aged 10. My mum is both a Pentecostal pastor and a feminist, which makes for some interesting contradictions in my upbringing.
the only thing my mom ever took away from me was an old issue of Cosmopolitan. i believe i was about 10 or 11 at the time.
i should NOT have tried to read her copy of Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, also around that same age – i was both confused, shocked, and completely freaked out by the first few chapters, and never finished it.
I collected the Pokémon comics when I was 11 or 12. The local comic shop had a thing where you could buy 5 comics that weren’t selling well, in a pack, for £1 or something, and someone had put an extremely adult Mask comic in with the Pokémon comics. Fortunately, my Dad noticed before I read much of it.
What about receiving super inappropriate book recommendations from your parents? I read Wuthering Heights when I was nine on my mother’s recommendation and remember it like a confused fever dream. Everyone had the same name. I had no idea what was going on or why anyone did the things they did.
I read Lolita when I was eleven, again on my mother’s recommendation. She handed me her copy and said “This is one of my favourite books.” Eleven-year-olds do not understand Lolita, Mom! Unlike Wuthering Heights though, I remember a lot of it. Like, in great detail, down to sentences and stuff.
And when I was ten my Dad gave me a book of Cthulhu Mythos stories. I loved them all but one had a fairly graphic description of human sacrifice that involved a baby and I would not give that to a ten-year-old ever, no sir.
Like, my parents were great in a lot of ways, but all that just seemed unnecessary? They also tried to get me to read Carlos Castaneda books so I could understand their occasional jokes about assemblage points, but I didn’t and I’m fairly sure I’m glad.
When I was 12, I thought my parents would forbid me to read Roald Dahl’s The Witches, so I tried to hide it from them. My mom found it and told me she didn’t care and figured I was old enough to figure out what to read on my own, sort through it, and come to them if I had any questions. Mind you, I didn’t read Harry Potter until I was an adult because, while my parents told me I could if I wanted to, I got the distinct impression it would make my mom unhappy if I did.
I was, moreover, forbidden to watch Pokemon at friends’ houses (we didn’t have a tv) because someone told my parents if was demonic. Afik they never saw it themselves.
I think I read The Shining in about 3 or 4th grade. I didn’t get a lot of it, but I remember being uncomfortable. I think that freaked me out enough I stayed away from adult books for a while.
But I definitely read Clan of the Cave Bear too young (like a couple years later). An aunt saw I was reading it and gave my mother some shit for it, but my mom still never cared what I read. I think I was reading more advanced stuff than she was.
My mother not only let me read whatever I want, but defended my right to read whatever I wanted when a teacher in 7th grade had a parent-teacher conference with her to discuss the “adult nature” of my books (Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, Stephen King, Anne Rice, etc., which weren’t even all that bad). She said she’d respect the teacher’s request to not have me read them in her class, but she would not ban me from reading them outside of it. My mom knew me, knew my maturity level, and trusted me with them. Needless to say, my mom rocks and I never felt scarred by any of the books I read.
Memoirs of a Geisha, age 8 or 9.
We were on a long road trip, and I had already finished all of my books and complained loudly about it for an hour or so when I fell suspiciously quiet. My mom, sensing trouble, looked in the back seat to find me happily absorbed in her copy of Memoirs of a Geisha. She ripped that thing out of my hands so fast the spine tore a little, leaving me confused about what it meant that an eel was going to go into Chiyo’s cave for the next four years, until I finally got the chance to finish it.
I was an extraordinarily voracious reader and taught myself how to speed-read as a kid so that I could read more books faster. Initially my parents tried to read what I did in advance (for instance with the first few Harry Potter books) but by age six or so they gave up on this and just told me to come to them if I saw anything in a book I didn’t think was appropriate, trusting the fact that I was a goody two-shoes. Much like Mallory, I did in fact once present my parents with a book I decided was inappropriate (one of Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books) when I was about eleven, just old enough to realize the characters were having sex with each other and not old enough to realize that was fine. My parents and I had a good conversation about it, and my mother convinced me that the book was all right to read (I believe her quote was that the dialogue was “more cheesy than inappropriate).
The one thing I was ever actually forbidden from reading was House of G-d, which to my understanding is a fairly dirty book about medical residents. My dad kept it upstairs in his office, having been given it during his residency, and during my weekly half-hour of computer usage I would sneak peeks at it. I don’t think I ever got past the first page or so because there was a vivid description of a naked woman that I was horrified/fascinated by.
My mom made me wait until I was 13 or so before she let me read Memoirs of a Geisha.
As an eight- or nine- year old (maybe younger?) I was so excited when I saw the cover ofThe Color Purple movie, because I loved the color purple. My mom told me it was for grown-ups. So I picked the book by the same name up off her bookshelf, read the first page, thought “I’m too young for this,” and put it back.
No one censored me unfortunately. I wish I hadn’t found my sister’s Bret Easton Ellis and VC Andrews novels because for years they made me phobic of Los Angeles, New York, everywhere-that-isn’t-LA-or-NY, white men, bankers, and sex.
I wasn’t banned from reading anything, but there are 3 books I wish I hadn’t been allowed to read. The first two were laughably tame horror stories that scared the shit out of me when I was 4 or 5 (one was from a Wishbone book and was based on Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu!).
The other was Beauty by Sheri Tepper, which I started reading when I was 11 or so. I don’t remember much of the plot except that a teenage girl travels from medieval times to some dystopian future and everything is awful. She ends up going home with a gross predatory man who wants to take naked photos of her and I remember being so thoroughly sickened and unsettled by him and the general cascade of misfortune that I returned the book to the library without getting past the first few chapters.
My God, and here I thought I was the only one who had read that book.
TBH, I read it when I was in high school/college, so well past the point when I might have been traumatized by some of it (though, not gonna lie, there i<is>/i some traumatizing stuff in there — I can definitely see why it would have affected you!). But once you get past that stuff, it’s not all bad — in fact, it gets really enjoyable. The girl has to suffer, yes, but she perseveres and gets to go home, and also goes to all sorts of cool places and does lots of cool things (and matures in the process). If you appreciate great worldbuilding and/or historical detail, it’s even better. True, it has harrowing stuff in it — violence, abuse and dystopia — but it also has feminist, LGBT, sex-positive and environmentalist themes, as well as an underlying message of hope and endurance. (Full disclosure — I may or may not be a little obsessed with it.) All in all, a compelling if somewhat flawed book, but perhaps not quite appropriate for an eleven-year-old to read.
P.S.: Just one quibble about the plot — she actually has two gross predatory men after her, and she doesn’t go home with either of them, but one of them does send dirty pictures to her, instead of taking them of her. (I know it’s been years since you read it, but I just wanted to sort that one thing out.)
My parents did not allow us to read Judy Blume because it was inappropriate, and took Piers Anthony away from me when they realized I was reading the one with the girl who was a cutter and had been (very explicitly) gang-raped. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 so they probably weren’t wrong about that being stuff I should not have in my head. I still feel like banning everything the author wrote was a bit overboard, though. /pouts
The First Wives’ Club, which, fair.
Growing up, I wasn’t really banned from most books, although I was a voracious reader as a kid — my parents had to be really careful what they left lying around the house! (IIRC, one time, at the tender age of seven, I snuck into my parents’ closet and found an anthology of Black Revolutionary plays, which completely confused and horrified me.) However, I later discovered the Tintin and Asterix comics, which I loved to death — and still do, even though I now realize how problematic they are (especially Asterix). My mom tried to ban them for a time, mostly because she was concerned about the racist stuff in there — again, Asterix was far more blatant about it. Of course, this just made me want to read it more. Now I get it, but in hindsight I think it would have been better if my parents had tried to discuss this stuff with me, rather then outright banning it.
My mother is Very Opinionated (in the way that only German-American mothers can be), and liable to fits of temper, so I grew up with a self-inflicted impression that the only books I could check out from the library were books she had already vetted. (Apparently this was a huge overreaction, but I kept imagining what it would be like if I checked out a book that she didn’t like, and her “what on earth is THAT?!” reaction that would probably kill me if I had to experience it.) So I checked out other books in secret and hid them under my bed. (Yes, I am the eldest sibling.)
I do remember she was very anti- anything Richard Scarry, and scoffed at me once for reading those Ann M. Martin books about dolls coming to life, so I promptly stopped reading them. My dad really didn’t care what we read.
I don’t recall my parents ever forbidding me from reading anything in particular, thankfully. I devoured V. C. Andrews’s entire back catalog when I was 13 or so, and I can remember curling up in a corner with one of her books while on a visit to my grandparents’ house one day. My grandmother was shocked.
My grandmother, to my mom: “You let her read those books? But they have–” *whispers* “I-N-C-E-S-T in them.”
My mom, dryly: “She can spell, you know.”
My parents let me read everything, so I had to censor myself and feel my own personal shame around things I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to read. I’ll never forget the humiliation I felt when I made my mom buy me Forever by Judy Blume at an age when I hadn’t even had my first period, let alone started naming penises.
Ahaha that badass Marco. Also I had SUCH a crush on Tobias.
My mom eventually banned Animorphs books because I read them too quickly. I'd be through one in half an hour, which to her was a waste of money. I think it was around then that she handed me Lord of the Rings (which I'd wanted to read after the Hobbit but she and my sister decided I wasn't quite ready for), and I gave up on YA.
Wait… are you me? I too had the accessible through my room only attic space! Stuffed with books also.
I am loving these comments. I thought I was the only 10-year-old who read the whole Clan of the Cave Bear series, and I’ve always felt weird about it.
(I learned how to read so young that I tore through all kinds of weird stuff way too early; many of those books have been mentioned here.)
My question is: what awesome books are you *glad* you read when you were 10ish, because I’d love to create a collection for my daughter.
I caused quite a stir in the small town I grew up in when I started borrowing around my mom’s Fear of Flying, at age thirteen or so 🙂
Jin Ping Mei – it’s a very smutty Chinese classic. It’s the only book my parents didn’t let me read when SI was a kid. I read it at about 16.