Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

Did you ever read something your parents or teachers didn’t want you to read? Too hard for you, too risqué, too controversial, etc.?

Yep. The Client. I was 11 and my Mom thought it was not appropriate. So she would hide the book, then I would find it and read until she caught me, then she would hide it again and so on. Eventually she finished and realized the part she objected to me reading the most was the beginning, which I had already read. So she gave in, let me finish, and never interfered with what I read from that point on.

My parents never censored my reading. Although my mother might ask if I (or the teacher or the librarian) thought a book was appropriate.

I do remember one girl in my English class had to skip Tess of the D'Urbervilles because her mother objected to 15-year-old sophomores reading it. (She had no objection to Romeo & Juliet the previous year, though.)

I think my parents would have *preferred* that I not read romance novels at like 13 years old, but they never told me I couldn't.

I think I probably self censored more than they did. I remember my aunt loaned my dad a copy of The Loop and it sat on our table forever. So one day I started reading it while he was at work, but made sure I put it back in the same spot before he came home. That went on for a week or 2, but then I decided it was just too good of a book to only read it for a few minutes when he wasn't home and just began reading it openly. He never questioned it (and tbh, I'm not sure if he ever read it or just gave it back to my aunt!). It was one of my first adult books (that wasn't a romance novel, that is) and remains one of my favorites!

My parents never forbade me from reading anything. Never. My dad wouldn't let my sister and I buy or own comic books, but we could read them elsewhere.

My dad was very strict in a number of ways, but not about reading material. When one of my brothers was about 12 and hid The Joy of Sex in a bathroom drawer my mother saw it but just left it there (I only know because I asked her why it was there.) It wasn't porn and she knew it was a normal part of a boy's curiosity. I can't remember much about it but wasn't it some sort of educational book?

So weird, for some reason I thought of that book, The Joy of Sex, earlier today. The name was a takeoff on the famous book The Joy of Cooking. I think it contained sections with detailed illustrations on anatomy, positions, etc. But the idea of "joy" was that it was positive. There was also Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.

I remember someone passing around Peyton Place in high school, we only read the "good parts". Then in college it was The Harrad Experiment: The Sex Manifesto Of the Free Love Generation and Candy.

In a really different vein, our high school history teacher recommended we not read Gone with the Wind because it didn't portray the history correctly (including the glorification of slavery, I suppose) but I read and enjoyed it anyway. It wasn't really a prohibition, and I'm sure he was right. I also loved the movie, which now seems a bit embarrassing.

My parents were ok with comic books but for some reason my brother and I thought they wouldn't like us getting Mad Magazine. My brother bought one along with bubble gum, which they definitely didn't approve of. But they were fine with Mad, a lot of it was quite clever and taught me about politics, advertising, etc. by what it made fun of.

In my high school AP English class we read a number of books that were not approved as "required reading". Our excellent teacher would say, "I can't require that you read (Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, etc.), but we will be discussing the book this week and I do hope you will be prepared to discuss.

My parents were big supporters of reading... whatever I wanted to read.

Robin P wrote: "So weird, for some reason I thought of that book, The Joy of Sex, earlier today. The name was a takeoff on the famous book The Joy of Cooking. I think it contained sections with detailed illustrati..."

I wish I'd had that history teacher! Weirdly I decided to read Gone With the Wind when I was 10? I truly have no idea why I picked it or how I even found it but I had zero historical context for any of it at the time and I really wish kid me had maybe a little more adult supervision at that point.

My parents were just happy that I wanted to read instead of getting into trouble so I had zero oversight. The closest I ever got to "forbidden" was my dad asking me when it was still being published
if Harry Potter really promoted Satanism (our church was....conservative) to which I scornfully responded that I wasn't stupid, Dad, I wasn't going to start waving a stick in the backyard and thinking real magic was going to happen. If only he knew that I'd been reading Anne Bishop...

I wasn't censored and I didn't censormy kids but my daughter read Wicked and told me she thought she was too young for it.

I was the only reader in my house (or even family) and they all thought I was weird. So they had no idea what I was reading and therefore did not censor anything. Teachers didn't question what I was reading either. I don't remember a parent ever questioning what we read in class but I grew up in a poor community and parents were not involved in school beyond a "did you do your homework?" occasionally

However....everyone else was sneaking around the Flowers in the Attic series of books. It was extremely popular when I was in middle/high school, and adults had heard it contained incest and were concerned about our reading it, so most girls hid it...but I know very few who didn't figure out a way to read those books,

I don't remember being censored from reading any books (or magazines). I remember being excited to read Forever... by Judy Blume when I was younger than I should've been (as it was about teenagers having sex)!!!

When I was at High School one of my classmates read Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, which is about drug taking. Rather that the school being upset, they arranged a school outing to a local theatre where we all saw a production of it. It was very graphic and I (and my classmates) were shocked by what we saw. I guess the school justified it by saying it was an anti-drugs message.

One of my parents friends was an avid reader and she encouraged me to read the Alphabet Series by Sue Grafton, which got me started in reading lots of mystery and thriller books.

Ironically, because my eldest has Asperger's and had a very difficult time with death--she hated Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, a children's biography of Nathanial Bowditch who in his time greatly improved navigation for ships, due to IRL family deaths. Plus she had other issues, so I had to be careful with when she could read books. This means when she hit a certain age she read volumes of fairy tales (monsters, witches and various things were too much for her) to catch up. She could not have handled Hunger Games when it first came out, but she was ready by 14, and that went for Harry Potter as well (soul suckers, etc).

This meant that my second daughter waited for some of those. However, she gave my son The Hunger Games right away so he "got" to read it at a younger age.

However, I think that parents need to have a good handle on this and know what their children are ready for (not the same as outright banning) emotionally and to prevent them from having nightmares they might not otherwise have. My youngest brother though I was too strict when I wouldn't let my kids watch the cop show he was in because his step daughter was able to handle it and she's 2 years younger than my son. However, after he had a daughter who was far more sensitive he understood.

My elementary school had been once been a school that went to grade 12. When they changed it to k-6, they didn’t weed the library. My mom didn’t restrict what I read, but I came home with The Exorcist and another book that she was really upset about when she discovered them. I was in grade five and the books scared me so badly I couldn’t keep them in my room, and hid them under the sofa in the living room where she found them!

the only time i was ever censored was by the librarian in my elementary school. i wanted to read a Ramona Quimby book, and she wouldn't let me check it out. If i remember correctly, I wasn't "old enough" or some other such nonsense.

i was really bummed about it too.

I'm fairly certain my parents never told me I couldn't read something. The closest my mother ever got to that was withholding a couple books for road trips so we wouldn't burn through all our reading material on the way out and have nothing for the ride home.

I do recall a friend in my girl scout troop not being allowed to read Harry Potter (on the grounds that it promoted witchcraft). I had already devoured the first three books, which my grandmother had bought for me. My mom's attitude was essentially, "who cares? they're just books!"

In reading over some of the other comments, I vaguely remember some school libraries having areas that were limited to the upper grades, like an "8th Grade Only" aisle in middle school. But clearly this was not a big deal to me as I can't actually remember that ever preventing me from getting a book I wanted.