What was the first adult book you read?

[scottcsmith]

And no, I'm not referring to smut.

My first adult book was "The World According to Garp" by John Irving. I was 14 when I read it.

For some reason I really wanted to see the movie when it came out in 1982, but I didn't, and ended up getting the novel for Christmas.

Wholly inapporopriate for a 14-year-old, but did it ever change my perspective on books and reading, and it opened up a whole new world to me.

Up until that point I had been reading books aimed at my age group.

What was your first adult book?

[mikehiggins]

1. Caesar's Commentaries

I read it in the second grade.

Ah, a life wasted in dissolute studies in the Yonkers Public Library.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "The Stand."

Can't remember which one I read first.

[burrowowl]

3. The Divine Comedy

I was 8. I was intrigued by the title. My father said I don't think you can understand that, I said I can read anything. He was right, I didn't understand much of it then, but I read it.

[Bronco69]

4. Of Mice And Men

When I was about 13 or 14. Steinbeck is still my favorite author.

[SiobhanClancy]

5. Pride and Prejudice

I was about 8 when I read it,and have been in love with Mr. Darcy ever since:)

[Philostopher]

6. Ray Bradbury's 'Martian Chronicles'

I was probably nine or ten. I'd read 'R is For Rocket' and 'S is For Space,' and my mother hadn't heard anything evil about Bradbury's writing, so she okayed my reading it. It was a little beyond me in some ways, but for the most part, I was able to understand it. Bradbury's stuff seldom was so esoteric or adult that any bright ten year old couldn't have derived something from it.

[bobthedrummer]

38. Well what do you know, I recall reading "The Martian Chronicles"

as one of my first adult books and my age was about the same-I was into science-fiction for many years as a kid, I read non-fiction, politics and history today at 54.

[Droopy]

7. "The Stand" by Stephen King

It was the short version of the book. Years later when the unedited version came out I read it.

I don't know what drew me to the book. I was in the school library one day and came across it somehow. I was 15 at the time. It opened up a whole new world for me too.

[11 Bravo]

8. "The Yearling" by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I remember Dad was stationed in London at the time, so I was either 7, 8, or 9.

[amazona]

19. oh that book made me cry

It wasn't my first book of that nature but it was still so sad.

[RandomKoolzip]

9. 1984.

Read it at the age of nine, in the year 1984, and it totally molded my political perspective. George Orwell was the first "adult" author I ever read...before that I was totally addicted to reading the record reviews in Rolling Stone and the liner notes on the albums in my dad's record collection (seriously! I learned to read from reading rock critics!)

[chefgirl]

10. '1984'

I believe I was in seventh grade when I read it and I remember thinking, "what a horrible, bleak existence".
I never once thought that we would come anywhere close to it in this country.

Look how wrong you can be.

-chef-

[madaboutharry]

11. The Count of Monte Cristo

I was 12. It was my introduction to injustice.

[corporatewhore]

12. Candide!!!

and oooh did i love it

[nostamj]

13. "The Bounty Trilogy" Nordoff & Hall

still have it in my library!

(and still get turned on by half-naked sailors!) :spank:

[NightTrain]

14. I read Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" when I was 15.

So I'm pretty sure that was it.

[curse10]

15. Misery by Stephen King- I was 10

scary fuckin' book for a ten year old.

[XNASA]

16. "All Quiet on the Western Front"

It's hard for me to try and classify books as adult or for children. Some books staddle the line. I think I had read some Vonnegut and I know I read a bunch of Edgar Rice Burroughs prior to reading AQotWF.

But Remarque's classic is the book that changed my perspective from adolescent to adult.

[amazona]

17. i don't know

When I was in 2nd grade, I picked up a slim book that was a short novel or novella which dealt with a man having an affair with a woman in Africa. They were Brits or some other sort of colonial folks...the Africans I'm afraid were background. In any case about the time I got to the part where the man was responding to the woman's "scent," then I realized that I was reading something not meant for 8 year olds. It was not pornography, mind you, but the whole story was about the affair and the lions that had encouraged me to check the book out from the library were just the background noise....I read the whole thing just in case the lions jumped and killed someone. Don't think they did though.

[supernova]

18. Dracula

when I was about 9, I think.

[teach1st]

20. Manchild in the Promised Land

My first adult book was Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown, which I read when I was eleven or twelve. The book tells an autobiographical story about growing up in Harlem in the 1950s. My father gave me the book and told me to read it. Except for the woman who cleaned our house once each week and some brief encounters with various other service people, I had never talked with a black person, especially one my age. I remember wondering if most African Americans lived like Sonny, the story's narrator, who had started stealing and selling drugs at an early age. Our schools became integrated shortly after I read "Manchild" and I found that the African American children I met in my school in suburban 1960s Miami were more like me than were like Sonny.

My father never mentioned the book after he gave it to me. I was probably too young to read it. I promised myself after reading it that I would never do drugs.

Not too many years later, I broke that promise and traversed some of the same moral terrain as had Sonny, although my road back from addiction and its trappings was made smoother by the privileges afforded by my white skin. Throughout my recovery, I remembered the characters in "Manchild" and their struggles against much worse odds.

I recently reread the story. It's a remarkable book.

http://www.racematters.org/manchildinthepromisedland.htm

[caledesi]

31. I loved that book. It was a real eye-opener for me, being white

and growing up in a middle-class neighborhood. I still can feel the impact it had on me.

[populistmom]

21. Adult or "Adult"

Okay, embarrassed to admit, they are one (or two) in the same. I was twelve and I snuck into my mom's drawer and read The Joy of Sex and Fear of Flying the same night. Talk about innappropriate. Yikes!

I also read The World According to Garp when I was 14, one of my all time favorite books actually (and movies too). I was a bit jaded by that point though. Thankfully, just mentally jaded as I was still pretty young.

[aQuArius]

25. LOL I was thinking the same thing...

I havn't read an "adult" book, but I have read lots of other stuff....

[Kathy in Cambridge]

37. I read "Fear of Flying" and Harold Robbins Books

which were full of sex scenes when I was 12. I used to babysit for my cousins and my aunt had a plethora of cheesy adult books.

[bleedingheart]

65. Fear of Flying - read it when I was twelve!!!

[bobthedrummer]

41. "Lolita", "Autobiography of a Flea" and "Candy"

in seventh grade were my first excursions into adult adult literature.

[greatauntoftriplets]

22. Bond, James Bond.

I was 13.

[msanger]

23. The Enormous Room - ee cummings

I still can't spell, but I read it when I was a sophmore or junior in high school. It is his only novel, and I think it was anti-war, but I really can't remember.

[Kat45]

24. In 7th grade English class we read a whole bunch of classics

I guess those would be considered adult books.

[Bertha Venation]

26. The Decameron

n/t

[Bertha Venation]

27. Mrs. Venation reports that she read "Moby Dick" in the fifth grade because

her teacher and the school librarian told her it was above her reading level and she wouldn't understand it. "Showed them."

[OldEurope]

50. Dumas: Three Musketeers, when I was 10.

[Bertha Venation]

57. cool

:toast:

[LanternWaste]

28. Screwtape Letters or Fear and Lathing in Las Vegas

If the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis doesn't count, I'd have to go with Fear and Lathing in Las Vegas which I read when I was nineteen.

[Crunchy Frog]

29. Animal Farm

when I was about 10. I picked it up thinking that it was a nice innocent children's story about animals. It pretty much left me in a state of shock at the time.

[slackmaster]

61. Same title, age 8 here

I really enjoyed it, and looking back I think I actually understood much of it.

[LWolf]

30. I don't really remember.

When I was 8 or 9, I'd read all my books and started going through my mom's bookshelves. Methodically. I don't remember which was first; I do remember when she came home from work and found me curled up with her copy of "Everything you ever wanted to know about sex." She was mortified. I was mystified about her attitude. To her credit, she didn't ban me from her bookshelves. I'd been through them all by the time I was 11 or 12.

[ZenLefty]

32. I read the Shining when I was pretty young

I think I was about 10-11 years old. That damn book creeped me out! And I couldn't tell my mother about me reading it either, or she'd have a fit. The mobsters, the wasps, the ghosts - it was way creepy.

By the time I saw Kubrik's version on HBO, it wasn't scary at all. I liked it, but it was pretty clear that it wasn't the same story.

[BrotherBuzz]

33. Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart. It made a lasting impression on a ten year old.

[eyesroll]

34. At 12, I had a weird book request list for Hanukkah:

1.Babysitters' Club books
2. Sweet Valley High books
3. Every Judy Blume book in which menstruation was discussed (I didn't put it that way, but that was the net result)
4. "It," Stephen King

These requests were, for the most part, granted.
I read "It" in a few days. It was the first thing I'd ever read, save for the copy of "The Joy of Sex" my friend and I stumbled upon in her parents' room at age 9 or so, that had a fairly graphic sex scene in it. My parents never censored what I read -- I wasn't allowed to see R-rated movies until I was old enough to sneak into them myself, but my reading list was always diverse.

[FDRrocks]

35. Hmm. I read almost every Stephen King book in middle school.

Then burnt out in high school, started reading Chomsky in grade 11, then moved on to serious history a year later.

[Ellen Forradalom]

36. I read The Exorcist and QBVII

in fourth grade. But I don't remember if I read any grown-up books before that.

[Lisa0825]

39. "No One Here Gets Out Alive, " biography of Jim Morrison

I was 12. LOTS of stuff I didn't understand.... LOTS of stuff I just learned about!LOL

[scarlet_owl]

40. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. I was about eight.

I remember seeing the movie first when I was very young and my father brought home a copy of the book for me because I enjoyed the movie so much. I remember asking my father about the words I didn't know - like "shinny" (moonshine).

[CanuckAmok]

42. Catch 22, when I was 12.

And yet I went into the military. Go figure!

[kid shelleen]

43. 1984 and Brave New World

in Jr High. The yin and yang of dystopian mindfucks.

[SOteric]

44. My father used to read The Divine Comedy to me

when I was but a wee toddler. He read it in Italian. I understood nothing, but I loved the sing-song sound of the words when he read them. I think it imprinted the notion of lyric poetry on my mind quite early in life.

I began to read in both English and Italian rather early as a child and easily managed Victorian literature at the age of 10-12; -by which time I was also well into understanding Dante.

[ming]

45. Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

I was a little bit "behind" entering the fourth grade. Although the school thought I was mentally retarded, the fact of the matter was I was just deaf due to massive scarring in my inner ears from chronic ear infections. Anyway, although I had an operation before, it didn't work so just before finals in third grade I had another operation. There was no noticeable improvement, I was still testing out with about 50% function in one ear and 30% in the other.

Well, about half way through summer break I remember being outside and staring up into the trees on the hill above our house. All of a sudden, it was like someone switched on a radio playing full volume. All at once it sounded like the birds and squirrels and everything was right inside my head. It was probably the first time in my life I had ever really heard anything.

So, a few weeks later I start fourth grade and to everyone's amazement I immediately went from performing in the bottom third of the class to performing in the top 5%. Amazing what a difference actually being able to hear your teachers makes! At the same time, while I had previously been a rather poor reader I started testing out at college level on the standardized tests. To this day, I'm not quite sure what the connection was between my hearing and reading ability other than when I read it is a very aural experience for me. Meaning, I hear the words in my head replete with seperate voices for the individual characters.

Well, to make a long story short, I started visiting the library quite often. It was not uncommon for me to go through five or six books a week, and I'm not talking about Dr. Seuss. In particular I discovered science fiction and I was lucky enough that my library owned a complete collection of Heinlein's juveniles which had a huge impact on me and heavily influenced my strong interest in science and mathematics.

However, it was not very long before I had virtually read every book in the juvenile section of the library. At the time, the town's librarian (yeah, I grew up in a town that small that it had one single solitary librarian) was quite a progressive soul and not only allowed me access to the "adult" section but also steered me to books and periodicals she thought would interest me.

Of course, I was delighted to find that the adult section had a whole science fiction section (a small five shelf bookcase tucked away in a corner). Which is how I came to read Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress in the fourth grade. Despite one's expectations though, this did not have the effect of turning me into a militarist free-market libertarian at a tender age.

I suppose it might have, but the very next book I read was Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. Despite the accusations that Heinlein was a Calvinist neo-con, I don't think this is true at all. If one reads more than Starship Troopers, I think you find that Heinlein was really trying to challenge all social conventions. Yeah, he was a staunch anti-communist, but I think you must consider the times in which the man existed. To him, communism was Stalin and then Khruschev. Soviet Russia was certainly no worker's utopia under any of the Soviet leaders but under Stalin and Khruschev I can certainly understand how the majority of people saw communism as the greatest threat of their time.

Because of Heinlein, and Asimov, and all the other wonderful Golden Age writers, I feel as if from a very early age I was challenged to never accept the status quo, to always question authority, to tolerate and understand divergent lifestyles. So there you have it. A librarian and a libertarian free-trader led me to become a progressive liberal. Go figure.

[TrogL]

46. Have Space Suit will Travel

Heinlein.

They ended up giving me an adult card two years early because I'd read literally every book in the kid's section of the library, some of them multiple times.

One librarian didn't believe that I was actually reading the books all the way through so I gave her an impromptu telling of the story, going on and on even after her begging me to stop, saying "oh but the next part is really kewl". She shut up after that. I think she was one of the ones involved in getting me my adult card 'cause she wanted me out of her section.

[southerngirlwriter]

47. The King James Bible

Read it cover-to-cover the year I was 6.

Much of it went over my head, of course.

[Book Lover]

48. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (nt)

[101 Proof]

49. To Kill a Mockingbird when I was about 10.

[tishaLA]

51. "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf

I was way too young for it. I should probably go back and reread it, but I have to many other books on my "to read" list right now.

[moz4prez]

52. does Asimov count?

I read The End of Eternity when I was 8. Implored my dad to read it, and so he did, though begrudgingly.

Of course Asimov counts.

I read the Bhagavat Gita when I was 9, and it screwed me up through my last year of junior high. I'm so glad I developed a working definition of good and evil at an impressionable age :(

[Ronnie]

53. Gone with the Wind

...when I was about eight. I sneaked it from my aunt's book shelf during a visit to Dallas. I have a feeling I didn't read it all, but I read enough to be disappointed when I saw the movie. The pictures in my mind were so much better. And the voices were much less irritating. Those phony southern accents really grind.

[WoodrowFan]

54. probably

Teenage Asian Cheerleader Hitch.. oh, wait, you said NOT smut. Um, not sure but when I was 9 I started reading my Dad's copies of Analog so I am guessing I started with some Science Fiction, probably Asimov.

[Beaker]

55. I don't suppose that F.Scott Fitzgerald counts, does he?

considering that he never wrote an adult-level book.

[moz4prez]

58. sacrilege!

YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!!!!!

[Loonman]

56. H.G. Welles

The War of the Worlds.

In 3rd grade.

[noonwitch]

59. "The Thorn Birds" when I was about 11

My mom had lots of these types of books around. She let me read this one.

I still give her a hard time for thinking that this story is romantic. My synopsis:

A grown man in his 20s, who is also a priest, falls in love with a beautiful 9 year old girl. Because he's hot-looking, the girl develops what should be just a normal, healthy crush. He is friends with her family, and the girl's ancient aunt has a thing for him. When she dies, she leaves the priest in control of all her money, which leads to his eventual elevation in the church.

When the girl is around 20, he takes off with her for a weekend and has sex with her, starting an affair that lasts the rest of his life, despite his appointments as a bishop and cardinal. She has his child, and passes it off as her husband's. Her son ends up studying to become a priest, and dies young. The cardinal finds out about his son after the kid dies, and mourns what he missed. The mother is told by her mother that you can't steal from god/the church, because he will take back what you took. The priest dies. End of book.

I read "Carrie" next. That was much better and more fun.

[Bandit]

60. The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry miller

It was in late fifties or early sixties. Adult books were not very common. It was almost impossible to find a book that even had "damn" in it. America was a different place in those days. The first movie I ever saw that showed a naked breast was one called "Blow Up" in 1966

[jimbo fett]

62. Vonnegut's classice "Slaughterhouse Five"

Maybe that's why I became such an anti-war person...

[WillParkinson]

63. "Adult?" I don't know if you would consider this adult or not...

Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?

That was the book that made me question the existence of a higher power.

[Insider]

64. sidney sheldon: the other side of midnight

sigh

[Booberdawg]

66. Rosemary's Baby