Grown-up books

A book about a dog called “Tatterdemalion”, read over and over again. I wish I had a copy now. “The Herries Chronicles”: without much understanding, my mother wanted to know why I asked her the meaning of “clandestine”. “And Quiet flows the Don” again without much understanding but I hated children’s books and ended up teaching literature.

Oh yes musicgirl you’ve reminded me of the Miss Read books. I loved them - warm and cosy.

Several others have mentioned Dennis Wheatly,I remember reading all of his books,I was probably mid teens at that point,I useď to read Agatha Christie, does any one remember the Miss Silver mysteries,similar to Agatha Christie,by Patricia Wentworth.
I read for escapism,I would love to say that I read all the classics.I did read Dickens,and RL stevenson,Robinson Crusoe etc as a 9,10 year old,even read the bible,I was given for my 10th birthday.
I am more than happy with my Crime and psychological thrillers,these days.

lixy

My G'ma had a bookcase full of penguin paperbacks and I read the lot over the years when we visited.
Started with Agatha Christie and have enjoyed crime fiction ever since.

Same here! I loved the illustrations on the covers of the 1950s / 60s Christies

I vividly remember reading The Female Eunuch when I was 13

The first book I read by myself in English was The Wind in the Willows. I was 7.

Like someone else up post I had read more or less everything there was I wanted to read at our children’s library by the time I was 11 but was too young for the adult library. So I raided my step father’s reading matter and (unbeknownst to him) I read The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley. I was shocked at the time but now it seems like complete tosh. After that I read 79 Park Avenue by Harold Robbins ….. 😵‍💫

The Jalna series. I also enjoyed Dennis Wheatley and Daphne du Maurier.

Oh yes - Born Free and Tanglewood Tales.

Agatha Christie
George Simeons Maigret
Sherlock Holmes
Daphne du Maurier

And I'm still reading them now along with modern detectives/thrillers etc

My parents went on a rare ( annual ) shopping trip to Newcastle when I was 10 ( Grandma would only babysit us once a year !)
They bought me a small hardback copy of Nathaniel Hawthornes " Tanglewood Tales " in a beautiful dust cover.
I adored both the writing and the book itself.
It remains on my bookshelf, one of my most precious possessions , 56 years later.

I was given Pride and Prejudice was I was thirteen by a much loved aunt, and although I found it a bit slow I read it and came to love it.

Before that I had read any Georgette Hayer I could get my hands on, practically every one of my father's Donford Yates' and Agatha Christie's , but gave up on Buchanan and Walsh.

I don't think my parents really made a distinction between adult and teenage books. If they considered a book risky in the sexual sense it wasn't likely to remain on their shelves.

My friend lent me Jane Eyre when I was about 11. My mother was in a book club and I read some of the monthly selections she received, I remember The Darling Buds Of May being one. There was also a James Bond novel which didn’t appeal to me, A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch and Room At The Top by John Braine. After I left school at 16 I joined the library getting an adult membership, my choices were random but I remember enjoying The Haunting Of Toby Jugg and A Clockwork Orange which I thought was amazing. My mother had lots of Jean Plaidy books which I liked reading and also several by Susan Howatch which were good, especially The Wheel,Of Fortune.

At either 10 or 11 I read The Hobbit for an inter-school reading quiz - I loved the book but as usual my memory let me down for the quiz and I couldn't remember which hobbit was which 😕 Lord of the Rings came a year or two later. By 12 or 13 I was reading my DM's library books as well as my own each week - I don't remember what they were, probably light fiction, except for Georgette Heyer which I loved and still reread now and then. Mr DF introduced me to autobiographies and classics a little later. I never really enjoyed most classics though until I was in my twenties.

My parents didn't own many books although my mother borrowed books from the local library. One that they did own was a collection of ghost stories by M R James and The Mezzotint scared me rigid. I remember buying a beautiful copy of Pride and Prejudice bound in the softest leather at a jumble sale, and my disappointment on reading it to find that it was a two volume edition so that it ended in the middle of the story. The book that made the strongest impression on me was Hatter's Castle by A J Cronin which I read as a 10 year old. I put off rereading it until recently because I feared that it wouldn't be as good as I remembered but how wrong I was. It is a powerful and thought provoking tale about male dominance. I also loved , the Berry books by Dornford Yates then, but wouldn't even look at them now.

I started to read adult books when I was around thirteen. The original series of All Creatures Great and Small began at about that time so I read James Herriot’s books one by one. I discovered Miss Read around the same time. Agatha Christie and Joy Adamson (Born Free) followed. By this time, there were some books being written for teenagers but they were more for reluctant readers so their aim failed spectacularly as readers like me would not be seen dead reading them and their intended reluctant reader audience mostly didn’t read them anyway. Teenagers these days have a plethora of books aimed at their age group to choose from. I have always been a big reader but not so much classics. When l was a younger teenager my dad kept telling me that I “should” be reading Dickens - which, of course, had the effect of putting me off Dickens altogether. It took me years to get back to reading his books. I tend to prefer film versions of the classics as I don’t like long, verbose passages of description - sacrilege l know. I have always read poetry for pleasure, though. I like plot driven novels, even when they are considered “literary.”

Sorry that came up twice 🤷

annifrance

We had to read Pilgrims Progress during the last year at junior school. We all hated it! How ridiculous to get 11yr olds to read that!

When my daughter was about 8 or 9, a Sunday School teacher was reading Pilgrim's Progress to the children, in instalments, but unfortunately left the area before finishing it.
My daughter really wanted to know what happened and I got a children's version (simplified but not too much) for her to read herself.

annifrance

We had to read Pilgrims Progress during the last year at junior school. We all hated it! How ridiculous to get 11yr olds to read that!

When my daughter was about 8 or 9, a Sunday School teacher was reading Pilgrim's Progress to the children, in instalments, but unfortunately left the area before finishing it.
My daughter really wanted to know what happened and I got a children's version for her to read herself.

I only learned about "proper" books through school. My father's literary aspirations didn't stretch much further than Dick Francis. My DM was better educated, but she only read murder mysteries from the library.

I was given classics like Jane Eyre and Villette by godparents and neighbours at the age of about 9 or 10 which I still have and have even read in the meantime.

I regret not having read more while I was at school but I'm not sure I would really have appreciated them properly.

I have come to love Dickens, Swift, Austen, Defoe, Stevenson etc and am grateful that their collected works are available for almost nothing as e-books and I can dip into them at any time.

I read my first ‘grown up’ novel when I was ten. It was ‘Wuthering Heights’ and although some of the darker themes escaped me then, I loved it. In fact it has remained my favourite novel ever since and I re read it most years. Being 66 now, that’s a lot of times and I can recite swathes of it from memory! As a child I read voraciously and loved all kinds of mythology, Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Celtic. Some had pretty adult themes, I suppose! I remember ‘borrowing’ my mother’s Francoise Sagan books, ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ etc around that time and feeling very grown up and sophisticated although I found them a little dull. I also read a few of her Jean Plaidy and Anya Seaton historical novels which piqued my interest for more so I started delving into non fiction books of that sort, a passion that has stayed with me ever since.

Casino Royale wow was it the first James Bond? I think I was about 12 and I didn't tell my parents I had read it. So sexy, has influenced me ever since 😍 I'm going to be 78 next month

We were allowed to choose our own school prizes from a local bookstore, I chose a couple of Jalna books, but it was decided they weren’t appropriate for a school prize.

My grandparents had a wonderful collection of books, including Britannica which I loved. They had all the classics so I grew up on Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare. Dracula was also a favorite book of mine which I read at age 11. I also got into Sf through reading Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series and HG Wells.

Our (quite small) local branch library was opposite my secondary school so I joined at 11. There was never any question of needing an "adult" ticket as I soon became friendly with the lady who ran it. I was the only member of my family who was an avid reader. That probably had some bearing on my going into librarianship at 16.

Thomas Hardy , The Mayor of Caster Bridge, then all his other novel as well as Dickens, My father had leather bound copies of all the classic books.

The Jalna series by Mazo de la Roche, all borrowed from the adult library.