The first is teenage angst and a mental breakdown. Though, if I recall correctly, the breakdown wasn't mention by Holden.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.....It's a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before...

Know too many lines from the Tarzan series. Of the twenty-four or so books if I had to pick a favourite it would The Son of Tarzan. Korak, not that movie nonsense, Boy.

Classics, to me, are subjective. It may all be a matter of timing, really. The beginning of adult cognizance, the reading matter that is available, and don't forget, reading ability.

Catcher in the Rye was a book I devoured in high school. I re-read it a couple of years ago & think it was best left to my teenage sensibility. however, the line about someone writing "F---" on every nice place in the world still holds up.

The classic books, I think are best read when you want to. At least that's been my experience. I remember slogging through more of them than I enjoyed during school, but reading on my own I've found many, many favorites.

I love Salinger's other writings more than Catcher in the Rye, but I remember vividly reading his works for the first time. No other author seemed to "understand" young teens...I must have been going thru some angst of my own about then.

I'm still trying to catch up with all the classics I missed...or just well known novels with memorable characters which are often referenced in other books. Some I've enjoyed (Balzac) and are permanent fixtures in bookcase, but others like Dickens I've just not been able to get through. josh

The very first "grown up" book that I read was "Gone With The Wind." I was a good reader but I was only in the third or fourth grade and it took me MONTHS to finish it.

Up to that time, History had no meaning to me. It meant just something that happened waaayyy back then. Margaret Mitchell's look at the South and the situation as it was then was a real eye-opener.

History became a living thing to me then. I think it helped me see how things in the past, influence things in the present.

I read just about everything I could get my hands on since I knew how to read......but the years of my glory were when I was a young teen, about the age of my g'daughter now. My father was gone often for his work for several days at a time. My sister was away at a boarding school and my mother would stuff me on the back of her little motorcycle and we'd head for the library. It stayed open late every weeknight to about nine p.m. and we usually shut the joint down, then we'd check out as many books as they'd allow and we could stuff in a bag on the back of the bike.

We lived on the ocean and in winter when the fog rolled in, we'd go out to the sunroom at the front of the house where the heat was, nestle into a chaise and read to the tune of the fog horns. It just doesn't get much better than that.

Greengage Summer was one I remember, and I also read Lolita. LOL. I didn't know it was ......ahem......not a suitable book for a kid that age. Of course I just acted nonchalant and read it anyway, curiosity getting the best of me. But the one I thought was soul changing was Grapes of Wrath. I've seen that kind of poverty and hopelessness and passages from the book has come back through the decades like those ocean fogs and haunted me.

The main thing I remember about "Catcher in the Rye" is that I didn't like it. Not the first time, not the second time, and most especially not the third time which is when I re-read it to see if age [mine] had improved it. It was dreary and induced depression as well as being depressing. I objected to it when it was included in DD's list of must-reads in her junior year -- the preceding year several local teens committed suicide. 9 of the 12 books on that list were of or about or simply were depressing, and I was appalled at the lack of emphatic comprehension shown by the instructor/s who chose the list. We can be deeply influenced by what we read, and adolescents more so. Interestingly, Grapes of Wrath was also on that list, and I don't consider it a depressing book. Graphic, yes; memorable, yes; but one's spirit isn't dragging earthworms after reading it.

Like Suzi, I began reading young, and was fluent long before school-age. No one censored my reading, although one principal did require a written book report for most of the books I borrowed from the school library. He dropped that requirement after I turned in a report on the "Moonstone." Apparently he hadn't realized that it was among the shelved books.

Thank God my parents didn't censor my reading either. In fact, I remember them having to sign a form at our local public library allowing me to check out whatever books I chose from the adult stacks when I was in third or fourth grade.

I remember being partial to big, fat volumes of historical fiction & I wasn't too particular about their literary value. I found Forever Amber particularly illuminating - LOL!

I read Catcher in the Rye when I was 15 because that's when it came out.
I loved it! My friends and I talked about it a lot, they loved it too...we felt that it was a book the really addressed young people.
I also read anything and everything! I collected Nancy Drew books, read every one that came out, then made book covers out of wall paper and sat them on a shelf while I went on to other things.
I also loved historical novels. I never took a history course beyond what was required, all I know of history I learned from novels or Shakespear plays! LOL!
Linda C

Speaking of whom, can you imagine being a tenth grade teacher and spending a good part of the year on Shakespeare works? I had a teacher like that, and she was an intimidating character, and one whom you don't even THINK of appreciating until you finish growing up...then thank the fates for that coincidence.

She pandered to his ribald side and that made all ears perk up. After we discovered he wrote for the common folk, and his plays were SUPPOSED to be pertinent, funny/tragic, and not-so-proper......we explored at length as we studied them. I'd have never, ever appreciated, let alone voluntarily read them had this not happened.

LOL, Calliope! Yes I can imagine such a thing... seeing as how my mom was my tenth grade English teacher...
who spent a good part of the year on Shakespeare works...
and she is a demanding teacher (in spite of her constant need to "pun" during lectures)...
and her former students are forever thanking her for her strictness and saying they didn't appreciate what she did for them until later in life... (Her now-grown children feel the same way too.)

It's hard to respect a parent, with whom one has such an intimate relationship, in the same way one respects a teacher. But my mom did a phenomenal job of making Shakespeare come alive for many of us by helping us to understand his humor and the "colorful" nature of his works.

I wish I had had a teacher that could have made Shakespeare interesting. All of my teachers seemed to find him as boring as the students did.

A couple of years ago, one parent with a daughter in her senior year in high school, got very upset about the schools teaching Shakespeare's work. He considered them "dirty" and inappropriate for teens of that age. He must live under a rock about what today's teens are used to. Needless to say....Shakespeare stayed.

Nice thread. My mother never censored anything I read but what she did do was strongly encourage me to read some of the books she read as a child. I read every one of the Bobbsey Twins books before reading all the Nancy Drews,at her request. My mother insisted I read Anne of Green Gables or at least a few pages of it. Of course I was immediately hooked. Like you Aileen,the first adult book I read was Gone With The Wind which I read when I was 10. I can still remember like yesterday carrying that book around and reading it every chance I could and also what a let down when I finished it.