Books that made you feel odd when you were young

BossArky

Was thinking about this over the weekend...

Do you know the feeling when you were young and read about something for the first time and it gave you a strange feeling or something foreign which you didn't particularly like? i.e. a fear of the unknown

I remember getting this when reading about the Holy Crusades. I must have been somewhere between 6 to 10 years old. Not exactly sure. Another one was reading things like "Just William" where the lives of the characters were in a different country... or the language they used was different. e.g. English slang as opposed to Irish.

Does anyone remember these first feelings of reading certain types of books whilst young?

Kolodny

Definitely. I remember feeling a bit strange when reading several books when I was very young. Particularly with some of Roald Dahl's books, I suppose because some of his stories were a bit darker than what I'd read before and didn't necessarily have the happiest of endings. I'd feel a bit 'unsettled' when things got creepy and there was a sense of it not turning out all right in the end, but I sort of enjoyed that feeling - if that makes any sense!

Piste

I read a lot of the Enid Blyton books about boarding school. They always made me really want to go to Boarding school!

BossArky

One of the few things I remember for first infants at primary school was reading those books with pictures of things..e.g. cakes and feeling really hungry!

bounty_hunter

Kolodny wrote:

Definitely. I remember feeling a bit strange when reading several books when I was very young. Particularly with some of Roald Dahl's books, I suppose because some of his stories were a bit darker than what I'd read before and didn't necessarily have the happiest of endings. I'd feel a bit 'unsettled' when things got creepy and there was a sense of it not turning out all right in the end, but I sort of enjoyed that feeling - if that makes any sense!

Ditto. The BFG (I was living in London at the time) made me uneasy about the city centre for ages.
Directly after that I read Oliver, which had the same effect. After reading both of those I started to notice things like crime on the news and the appearance of poverty-striken areas a lot more and it frightened me slightly that these sort of things were going on around me.

muesli_offire

'The Sandman' - E.T.A. Hoffmann

NoDayBut2Day

I dont' think I ever read a book that made me feel "odd" as a kid...

Keyzer

Kama Sutra had a profound effect on me in my younger days....