I'm beginning to think I was too young when I read...well, anything. We Have Always Lived in the Castle I read when I was 12, and that was one of those books that put me in a completely other headspace for days. Like I was convinced I'd poisoned my parents.

I was 11 maybe when I read Lord of the Rings, so no shiver at the Dernhelm reveal - I just was like, well duh it's Eowyn and duh she's going to kick his ass.

Back another year to 10, and Watership Down and I cried and cried and named my stuffed rabbit that I slept with Fiver and totally did NOT get the Christian metaphor.

Which was okay, because I didn't get it in Narnia either until I reread them in college. I'd picked them up after loving LOTR, randomly, seeing a cover with a dude with a sword on it, and was pretty "eh" about them. Loved them much more later.

And I was WAY too young for Lord of the Flies and Catch-22, but those did teach me to not go whining to my English teacher parents that I had nothing to read.

Although, when I read Amityville Horror later, I had a retroactive A-HA! about the pig and flies and stuff in LofF.

Back another year to 10, and Watership Down and I cried and cried and named my stuffed rabbit that I slept with Fiver and totally did NOT get the Christian metaphor.

There's a Christian metaphor?

Dear God, is there ALWAYS a Christian metaphor?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle I read when I was 12, and that was one of those books that put me in a completely other headspace for days. Like I was convinced I'd poisoned my parents.

That's another good topic that we've sort of touched on. Books that fuck with your head. For me it was reading Hell of A Woman by Jim Thompson. Nothing like being in the head of a pure sociopath for a couple hours to completely skew your world.

Dear God, is there ALWAYS a Christian metaphor?

Sometimes there's a Vishnu metaphor. You just have to look for it.

Dear God, is there ALWAYS a Christian metaphor?

LOVE the meta.

Sometimes there's a Vishnu metaphor. You just have to look for it.

Which is tough in English/American Lit. But would be a great mental exercise.

Books that screwed with my head:

Life Size, by Jenefer Schute--novel told in first person by the narrator, a young woman hospitalized for anorexia. Really got me into the head space of a condition that I can never fully understand.

The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper--I was (mostly) enjoying it (her environmentalist screeds were getting on my nerves a bit, though), until The Moment when everything is revealed. I realized I'd been completely mistaken about assuming some rather big assumptions and my mind was blown!

Sheri Tepper's book Sideshow really fucked with my mind. It starts off with conjoined twins, whose parents put one thorugh a sex change operation so they could have a boy and a girl. They join the circus and at some point the sci fi element of the book kicks in. Honestly, I couldn't get past the squickiness of the conjoined twins and I'm pretty sure there's some incestious action going on.

I don't think I finished it.

Wow. That synopsis reads like she was trying to win a "how many of these elements can you include in one story" contest.

Books that fuck with your head.

Pynchon's V. I was in grad school between semesters, living by myself, spending a lot of time alone doing research and whatnot when I read it. It completely took over my brain, made me very paranoid and inclined to look for conspiracies everywhere. It's the gold standard for books taht fuck with the head, for me.

Oh, I had that Family Tree moment. She completely fooled me, absolutely. Yeah.

I liked Sideshow but I felt like I was missing out on references to her other books - Grass, I think, which I hadn't read at that point.

Messed with my head Garp, HST, probably Catcher In The Rye (Lefty cliche, much) Catcher was kind of a delayed reaction, as I was a goody-goody high school girl who spent the whole first reading wanting HC to get an incomplete in English. Because it seemed very much like the other teenaged books and because I thought I would get the whole Chapman/serial murder lovefest with the book. The next year I was different, and I figured out if you are bugfuck you will read things in books that aren't in them.

I was just looking at the Amazon entry for Family Tree, and they include a Library Journal review that reveals the big twist in the opening sentence. Bah on spoiler-revealing reviewers!