Goodreads Ireland discussion

Does there have to be a transition ☺I still read a mix.
But I think for me it was the summer I broke my arm at 13. I got a few books from a teacher , Seek the Fair Land and Adrian Mole Minor to Major. I devoured both of them and moved up the reading spectrum from there. Next up was The Hobbit leading to LOTR and oddly a lot of John Grisham.

I started reading when I was around 10 or 11 with Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan. I fell absolutely in love with him and this love affair quickly led me to read the next 21 novels of his with nothing else in between. When it turned out his was actually from and living in Limerick boosted my infatuation. At that age I was fairly ignorant of how wide the variety of books available were, although I was quickly educated.
To get back to the question, the first adult book I read is a tough one to recall. I had read books like To Kill a Mockingbird and other books that deal with weighty topics. Leading on to The Colour Purple, Trainspotting and Angelas Ashes would be when I truly lost my literary innocence :)

Stephen king and Terry brooks took over my teenage reading. I loved the transformation to other worlds.

What a great question. I'm not sure if I can pinpoint it exactly. I do remember the transition of moving from girls' mystery books (Nancy Drew) to Anne of Green Gables, and I remember in 6th grade reading an adult biography of Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt. Around that time, I read Wuthering Heights, too.

I've been racking my brains to think about which book it was for me but i just can't pin it down. I began reading Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte in my early teens before that maybe some Rosamunde Pilchur and I even went through a Sidney Sheldon phase but I can't really narrow it down.

For me it was books like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, also Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice was popular then. There must have been others, but what were they??? I read War and Peace when I was about 17 then Jane Austen and George Elliot soon after, so my adult reading must have been well established by then.

I remember the first tentative glances at the 'grown up' section in WH Smith's and because I enjoyed fantasy based children's' books I chose 'The Overman Culture' by Edmund Cooper (science fantasy). I can't remember too much about it now but, for a small group of us, this genre dominated our reading through the mid teenage years.

It's quite a difficult question indeed :D
I started reading books destined to adults very early, still this doesn't mean I was able to understand them...
The first one I read could technically be an Italian author called Piero Chiara, whose novels depicted with some humour life in a small town called Luino, near the border with Switzerland. I was maybe 9.
The first one I dealt with in an adult way could be 1984, or A Clockwork Orange. I was 12, and ever questioning everything. So my father decided to give me something serious to question about. It worked! :D

My first 'adult book' was also Wuthering Heights - seems to be a common one for some reason! Was everybody else inspired by Kate Bush too?

IanieB wrote: "@Theresa War and Peace!!? I want to attempt to tackle that beast next year; not simply because it's one of those pretentious must-read-or-else-you-can't-read novels, but also because Tolstoy is sup..."

Well, I had this weekend with nothing to do and read half of it, the second half took a lot longer even with not paying too much attention to the battle scenes. I've always loved a challenge :)

@Iain, Kate Bush is indeed awesome. I commend your taste ;) I've tackled War & Peace - it's really good, but the second half is full of non-story excursions into Tolstoy's philosophy about history. His point of view is totally reasonable, but it's not exactly what the reader is expecting after hundreds of pages of narrative, so it comes across as though the story is being interrupted again and again. And my GOD the second epilogue is a dull read, but after 1000+ pages you feel sort of obliged to read it, just to properly finish the thing.

@Theresa: I don't blame you for taking longer to read the second half - some bits of it are a struggle!

@Iain, is that a new year's resolution? :)