I read Stranger in a Strange Land at the age of 12. I grew up in a VERY repressive, conventional household, so conventional as to be nearly a stereotype. By 12 I knew that I didn't want to live that way, but I didn't know what else was out there -- I was carefully sheltered from everything nonconventional.
But my mother thought that reading was good for children and that it was "educational," so she didn't censor my library reading. It was educational, all right, though not the way she meant. :-)
I didn't understand all of SIASL at 12, especially since I'd been so shielded from other realities, but I knew that there was something important in there that I needed to understand. I read it over and over again, two or three times a year all during my teens.
When I reread the book recently, after not having read it for awhile, I was surprised to see how much of my personality and thought processes are lifted directly from Heinlein. I owe that man my life.
From what I know about you, I think this story will sound a bit familiar, though the title of the book will be different. :-)
Have you read For Us, the Living, his unpublished first novel? He wrote it in 1939, and almost everything he would ever write was contained in that book in microcosm. It's wild to realize how much he knew about where he wanted his writing to go, nearly 50 years before To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-03-06 03:11 am (UTC)But my mother thought that reading was good for children and that it was "educational," so she didn't censor my library reading. It was educational, all right, though not the way she meant. :-)
I didn't understand all of SIASL at 12, especially since I'd been so shielded from other realities, but I knew that there was something important in there that I needed to understand. I read it over and over again, two or three times a year all during my teens.
When I reread the book recently, after not having read it for awhile, I was surprised to see how much of my personality and thought processes are lifted directly from Heinlein. I owe that man my life.
From what I know about you, I think this story will sound a bit familiar, though the title of the book will be different. :-)
Have you read For Us, the Living, his unpublished first novel? He wrote it in 1939, and almost everything he would ever write was contained in that book in microcosm. It's wild to realize how much he knew about where he wanted his writing to go, nearly 50 years before To Sail Beyond the Sunset.