What Were Some Of The Books Your Parents Had When You Were A Kid (And Did Any Of Them Freak You Out?)

Oh, and a WWII picture book that had lots of gross pictures of dead bodies and blood. That freaked me out a lot too, because I had never seen death before. I don't even think I knew what it was really. I would torture myself by looking at that book.

the leonard cohen book (beautiful losers?) freaked me out because it had a trippy picture on the cover. also, everything you always wanted to know about sex*. every copy of that book should be rounded up and burnt!

*but were afraid to ask

My dad had loads of books on battelships!

Also we had a set of Encyclopaedias from 1948. Looked good, but led to a lot of my homework being dubbed 'colonial'.

James Herriot, a lot of Dune Books, Asimov, Bradbury, Du Maurier, Vonnegut, Studs Terkel (is that "Working"?) several Ibsen plays for some reason (I think it was a class my dad took). The title "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" really perplexed me as a child. My mom's art history books provided some interesting lessons in er, anatomy. They also had the whole Shogun series, which is not something either of them would normally read. I agree with Lauren on the *sex book. They also had some Kandinsky prints on the bookcase that scared the hell outta me as a kid. My dad also swore to my brother and I that he had "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" story somewhere.

This wasn't when I was a kid but... I recently found "Why Men HATE Women" in my mom's old bedroom. Must have been a post-divorce purchase.

My parents had a lot of art books and some weird self-help books from the 70s whose titles elude me right now. Lots of people in funny clothes looking sad or happy on the cover. The one that freaked me out the most was 'Delta of Venus' by Anais Nin. I was in high school when I figured out what it was. Auugghh. Parents don't have sex. They just hold hands!

My dad had some interesting magazines I found once.

Any other children of counselors/psychologists/psychiatrists here? I maintain that there is no childhood book trauma like our childhood book trauma.

For some reason we had a copy of Updike's 'Couples' in our house when I was kid - odd, cos there were no novels other than Dick Francis and Agatha Christie otherwise. I was scandalized to an almost Pinefoxian degree by the sexy scenes.

This may explain my addiction to books, the only two books (no, THE ONLY TWO BOOKS) in the house were coffee table size, definitive works editions of Da Vinci & Michelangelo. I inherited them about 10 years ago.

I had to get my literary fix at the local library.

My father hardly ever read a book, but my mother had a lot of her father's books, including a complete set of Morocco-leather-bound Dickens, three of which I read. But I found a book in my parents' closet once titled "Over Sexteen," which was pretty interesting. I think those jokes are still going around on "Saturday Night Live."

My parents has a copy of a personality test book from the 60s called 'Meet yourself as you really are?', which in addition to having baffling questions like "Would you describe yourself as a Platonist or an Aristotlean?" (changing times, huh?) asked whether one had had a happy childhood. I couldn't decide what I should put, aged 10.

Also, it was a bit freaky because all the questions were already answered in pencil by someone. I wasn't sure who, but I thought it was my mum. I think I later found out that it was actually my uncle.

My brother and I had to share a room for many years because my father had one room filled with history books. They were all fascinating, mostly dealing with the American Civil War and Napoleon. Also the stash of dodgy magazines that turned me a tidy profit in elementary school.

My mom kept a steady stream of mystery, horror and Xanth novels. She got me started on Xanth and Stephen King at an early age. Xanth was great fun as a pre-pubescent for the (OMG so awful) sex scenes and puns.

The two tomes of "Don Quixote", particularly the illustrations, used to freak me out quite bit as a kid. Especially when looking at those pictures on lonely winter evenings, waiting for mom and dad to get home from work.
UURGH!

My dad had all these literary tomes--18 in tall, hard-cover volumes--that he'd inherited from my grandmother. Hugo, Doestoevsky, Cooper, Poe, Mallory, Virgil...whoever. Shelves and shelves full of them. When I was little, they were the Don't-Touch-Those Books and the message was so pounded into me that I still wouldn't dream of doing more than looking at the spines.

My parents had many more books than any of our neighbors (they were teachers), but it was a weird and mostly unmemorable assortment. I do recall several volumes of Melville. Some of Twain. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were also old college textbooks, a rinky-dink encyclopedia no one looked at, and some falling apart paperbacks of things like The Decameron and Dos Passos.

When I was thirteen I decided I would read my parents' copy of Grapes of Wrath. It had been sitting there on the bookshelf all those years and sounded interesting. I must admit the final scene in the book sort of freaked me out - where the young woman (Rose of Sharon?) lets a grown man suckle her breast.

Linda Goodman's Sun Signs OTM.

There was a copy of The Joy of Sex that I'm pretty sure was left around by means of passive sex education (i.e. they wouldn't have to actually tell us anything, we'd just find it and read it ourselves, which we did). The book was a subject of great interest to my grade-school friends, engendering all kinds of "Ewww, why's he kissing her there?" and "My parents don't do that!" discussions. For years I had a vocabulary (semen, cunnilingus, missionary position) with only a vague sense of how any of the words related to any of the other words.

Much more disturbing and exotic to me was an underground comic I found buried in my dad's large comics collection, showing a robot (or metallic alien) graphically in delicto with a woman on some planet while meteors or lasers or something exploded all around them.

My father rarely read anything more detailed than the newspaper and the racing form guide. My mothers reading material of choice was Mills and Boons romance novels. Still they happily indulged my reading habits.

Perhaps the most perplexing book that i found was after my Grandfather passed away. Amongst his stash of Westerns etc he had a early Heinlein Sci-Fi story called Space Cadet. It perplexed me because my gradfather was a dock worker, very much a working class guy. When he was alive I would never have suspected had the least interest in Science Fiction, let alone keep hidden away in his possessions what was essential a boys own space adventure story. Of course now I never get a chance to ask him.

A play called "The Year of the Sex Olympics"

And (urgent and key to the fucking ultra-mega-max) STRUWWELPETER!!!!!

That book is child abuse in textual form omg

My dad: Hitler biographies
My mum: Nancy Friday
My mum and my dad: divorced
Me: confused

(Actually I never read any of my dad's books really, just loads of old novels (Hardy, Brontes, Austen, du Maurier, Dickens) and my mum's dirty er I mean empowering, erotic books.)

STRUWWELPETER! Oh my. The one with Struwellpeter himself on the cover with claws instead of fingernails?
The book i most remember from childhood is "Pilgrim's Progress" - not that I read it, but my parents tried to bribe me and my brothers to do so. I had it all mixed up with turkey and stuffing and nice Indians.

That picture of Struwwelpeter makes me shiver to this day. Quick googling reveals that the author, a doctor at an asylum, wrote it as a Christmas present for his 3-year-old son. Draw your own conclusions.

Just imagine, Archel, if it was your dad who had the Nancy Friday.

My mom was reading Helter Skelter when I was 9 or 10. I knew the basic story about the Manson family so I decided to read it secretly when she wasn't around. I didn't sleep for two weeks. Both of my parents thought I was having a breakdown. I never did confess why I wasn't sleeping. And I didn't stop reading the book because even at that tender age I had to finish any book I started.

dad had a phd in deviance (crim/pysch); mom had a phd in ed pysch.

dad:
de sade
masoch
henry miller
anais nin
foccualt (sp)
szadz
the tantra
joy of sex (vol. 1 and 2)
leonard cohen

mom
aside from the 70s and 80s hard core femminist stuff (andrea dworkin, germaine greer, operation housework, boxes of Ms)
I'm Ok, You're Ok
Fat is a Femminist Issue
A bunch of Self Esteem books
among others

(they also had lots of kafka, roth, hemmingway, classic lit)

Among lots of mysteries, bestsellers, world history, woodworking, Foxfire, crafting and progressive Christianity books, the one that sticks in my mind is "Your Erroneous Zones" by Dr Wayne Dyer.

My dad and his brothers left a cache of old comix -- archies and x-men, mostly -- that warped my psyche in all sorts of wonderful ways. I still sort of want to see Josie and the Pussycats even though I generally dislike movies and it's supposedly a really bad one.

I seem to recall stumbling across The Joy of Sex at some point in my childhood, the original edition with the bad watercolours and sketches of the bearded, furry guy going at it with... Sadly, as I write this, I realize how much I've come to resemble that guy...

My Dad used to read books about mountain climbing and tramping trips, and detective stories.

My Mum teaches English Literature and wrote her phd while we were kids. We had stacks of books everywhere. I remember reading and being made queasy and uncomfortable by: The Edible Woman and The Handmaid's Tale, The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Lord of the Flies, My Mother: My Self, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Owls Do Cry
(but I didn't finish that).

Lord of the flies terrified me when i read it much too early.

They had a terrible book called Rude Food, a joke present from friends surely - a hugely fat black woman getting dirty with bowls of cake mix.

It made me feel anxious.

I read C.S.Lewis "The Great Divorce" way too young. I loved Narnia - and my parents were getting divorced - so I thought it was a good choice. I was - um - ten.
Not good for kids!

Revive! I'm drunk!

o those halycon days of sneak-reading Frank Harris's My Life and Loves when I was 12. It's a romping intro to sexual predatory behavior, and a lot less clinical than the Joys of Sex (which we didn't have.) Also, Ramparts magazine, all those pictures of nude hippies. Both freaked me out. And Edward Gorey-- he really freaked me out, but I loved all three

Anthony's dad had Foucault?

I was disturbed to discover a, ah, "manual" beneath my parents bed. It had line drawings.

My dad had a nice collection of Time-Life books, "The Body", "The Mind", etc. The first of those contained a photo of a heart transplant operation which used to make me queasy, so naturally I couldn't stop looking at it. "The Mind" had a series of cat pictures painted by a schizophrenic artist called Louis Wain, which grew increasingly weird and frightening as his illness progressed. You can see some of them here.

They were great books, though. I was gutted when I discovered my parents had thrown them all out because they were "out-of-date".

I think all the T. Losang Rampa books warped me, along with Chariots of the Gods, The Late Great Planet Earth, and Dear Abby's What Teens Want To Know.

My parents had tame books: James Herriot, Shakespeare, histories of the American Indians, and Doonesbury comics. The creepiest-looking book on the shelves was Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.

When I started combing their bookshelves around age 11 looking for something to read, I found Clan of the Cave Bear. My mom wouldn't let me read it. For the longest time I thought it was full of exciting sex and violence. Then I read the “forbidden fruit” as an adult and realized she didn't want me to read it because it was 500-odd pages of pseudo-anthropological crap.

The Naked Communist
Rabbit, Run
Valley of the Dolls
The Group

Bummer -- my mother's tastes run to Grace Livingston Hill, Gene Stratton-Porter, and James Oliver Curwood (what is WITH those names??) so all my childhood reading was of noble, tortured romance and the struggle to maintain spiritual purity and women whose hair was their glory. My mother may have been born in the wrong century. Doesn't freak me out, though.

The only book of my parents' I remember was a hardcover of Gone with the Wind. After they divorced, however, my mother continually left things like The Happy Hooker lying around. I stopped bring friends home.

In the drawer where I found my parents' pornography was book of stills and dialogue from the movie I Am Curious (Yellow). I was unclear on whether it was in itself a "book," and I couldn't understand the weird un-eroticism of it. What was the deal? How did they get that book? There was surely better, nastier porn out there. Candy was in the drawer, too, and it was WAY better. The title—what was up with that? YELLOW???? Was the movie all yellow? It mystified my twelve-year-old mind.

When I was about 16, I came home from the video store one day with a copy of that movie. I was going through my phase of only being interested in foreign films (I had a big thing for Godard). I showed my dad what I'd rented, and he blushed and told me nicely that I really didn't want to see that film. Poor dad. He couldn't even explain to me why I didn't want to see it. I just thought it would be good because it was Swedish, and because the girl on the cover had a cute haircut.

I still haven't seen the movie...

I Am Curious (Yellow)
By Roger Ebert / September 23, 1969

Cast & Credits
Lena Lena Nyman
Borie Borie Ahlstedt
Rune Peter Lindgren
Magnus Magnus Nilsson
Chris Chris Wahlstrom
Marie Marie Goranzon
Ulla Ulla Lyttkens
The King Holger Lowenadler

An Evergreen Film produced by Goran Lindgren and written and directed by Vilgot Sloman; a Sandrews Production presented by Grove Press.

If your bag is shelling out several bucks to witness phallus (flaccid), then "I Am Curious (Yellow)" is the flick for you. But it you hope for anything else (that the movie might be erotic, for example, or even funny), forget it. It's a dog. A real dog.

What I'm curious about is how Barney Rossett and his pious pornographers at Grove Press got away with it. Sure, they edged it through the courts. But how have they convinced so many yahoos to spend (at last count) $4,500,000 to see it? You'd think the word would eventually get around.

Perhaps the legal defense should have given us warning. The usual parade of literary and movie critics stood up in court and testified (A) that the movie had redeeming social merit, and (B) that, speaking as a healthy adult -- honest, judge -- it didn't do a thing for me. That's easy to believe. "I Am Curious (Yellow)" is not merely not erotic. It is anti-erotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds.

It is possible, of course, to manufacture an elaborate defense of the movie. I could do it myself with one hand tied behind my back. I could talk about the device of the film-within-a-film, and the director's autobiographical references, and all that. But the movie is simply, basically, boring. It is stupid and slow and uninteresting.

I wondered at times, during my long and restless ordeal while the picture ground out at roughly the rate of three feet every seven years, whether it was perhaps intended as a put-on. But I doubt it. I think there actually is a director in Sweden who is dull and square enough to seriously consider this an art of moviemaking. There is a dogged earnestness about the "significant" scenes in the movie that suggests somebody moved his lips when he wrote the script and had to use a finger to mark his place.

Beyond that, there's also a pudgy girl with an unpleasant laugh (she thinks she's so cute). And a boy who looks like Archie rolled into Jughead. They do not exactly talk about current political and social problems, but they recite words associated with them. You can hear words like class structure, labor union, Vietnam, racism, Franco, non-violence and, of course, the Bomb. But these words are never quite assembled into sentences.

There are also, of course, the celebrated sex scenes. They may not be sexy, but they are undeniably scenes. The boy and the girl perform in these scenes with the absorption and determination of a Cub Scout weaving a belt. The one interesting aspect is that the hero succeeds in doing something no other man has ever been able to do. He makes love detumescently. I say the hell with the movie; let's have his secret.

Hrm. Maybe I won't put it on the Netflix queue then. They also have I am curious: Blue.

Those wacky Europeans. Always doing movies in color-series!

That review makes me a bit MORE curious to watch it.

We need to have a FAIACY. Fly people in from all points of the compass. We can do it in a central location, like Columbus, Missouri.

Actually, people should take trains, so they can read that creepy novelization w/stills on the way.

Can we hurry, then? I am already in Chicago...

We've rented a double-wide near Sanibel later this month, but fuck it. Who needs caressing tropical warmth and swaying palms? The snowy plains and Euro soft-core win.

I just realized that both of my posts in this topic have similar themes. Just like Mom and Clan of the Cave Bear, Dad probably knew it was just crap (in fact, I kind of remember him saying "well first of all, it's not very good") and therefore told me I wasn't interested, which translated to me as "it's dirty!"

Ah. A Quality Good vs Morality Good confusion. Your dad would only want the best in porn for you!

How could I forget:
http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/last_tango.jpg

Oh god! You were traumatized by a novelization too?

my father was a crimnologist, working mostly with sex offenders, esp. paedophiles.
my mother was an ed pysch, with a doctorate in children with behavioural disorders, and an ardent second wave femminist.

lots and lots of books on rape, amongst other things

(and yeah, chris, he only had one, discipline and punish, signet edition, shiny black paperback, with an etching from the malefecta malefectoroum on the ocver)

"It is possible, of course, to manufacture an elaborate defense of the movie. I could do it myself with one hand tied behind my back."

Yellowing movie tie-in paperbacks were just the worst.

They also had:
http://www.pandora.ca/pictures11/839804.jpg

My father didn't read books. My mother only had books on the history of lace. Oh, they did have Papillon. That was it. No wonder it took me years to discover how great it is to read.

My aunt translated Papillon into English! So of course, we all had to read it. It's fun!