Not JZ, but I second the Northanger Abbey rec. I think your students would really relate to it, especially the humor. And it has the added benefit of being much shorter than P&P and S&S!

At about that same age, I heard the Beatles song about California grass and said "Mom, I've been to California and their grass didn't seem that different. Maybe greener. Was it cause it was greener?" Mom said it was a different kind of grass.

So, a friend of mine just won a round the owrld trip worth 20,000 pounds. We were celebrating. I had beer and some Greek thing. But, holiday! Holy crap!

Wow! That is so very excellent.

The first books I read that had anything to do with sex were texts in the "What to expect when you're expecting" vein. But there were no penises in them. I had a vague notion of fertilisation through implantation, gestation and development through about age 10.

I went to the local library and researched the whole sex thing when I was about six or seven. Oh, and not long after, I received a book that covered most bodily functions, with (elaborate) cartoon illustrations of robots to demonstrate. Worked very well for joints and such like. The sex robots were steam-powered, and looking back, were pretty hilarious (and rather well-endowed, as they had but one raison d'etre).

While I don't remember it, I suspect my first encounter with a sex scene in a work of fiction was probably not envisaged in the way the author intended. (There may have been choo-choo train noises.)

I was about 9 when I found a discarded copy of Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers, which pretty much consisted of sex, violence, sex, torture, sex, violence.

ION, I just got a 404 message on a black page that said: "It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

ION, I just got a 404 message on a black page that said: "It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

That's awesome!

I don't remember my first sex book, but I do remember trolling my mother's bookshelves when I was bored (this was how I picked up Steinbeck and Nathanael West), and happening upon a book of Anais Nin pornography.

Even at that age -- probably 16 -- I was pretty sure some of the things she was describing (in that old, shy language, but used in a bold, muscular way) were not actually physically possible, or if they were, probably not as much fun as she was making them out to be.

Nathanael West

Wow. Cat People is really silly. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I've been expecting it...something more...for YEARS. Not here.

Miss Lonelyhearts?

Yes! It was an omnibus of that and The Day of the Locust, and Miss Lonelyhearts was first, and I got all the way through it in a single sitting. It was one of those weird, "Wow, not all that much happened in the story, but I dug it all the same" kind of moments that I associate with mature reading.

Cat People is really silly.

The Kinski/McDowell one?

Great Bowie song, though.