"Writer's Block: Forbidden Reading"

[Error: unknown template qotd] (Woohoo, somp'in ta waste ma tahm wiv.)

I don't think my parents ever tried to stop me from reading a book (probably because they either "wanted me to grow up an enlightened child" or (more likely) were too lazy(mother)/clueless(father) to bother), but there are a few vaguely relevant bits I can remember:

First; when I got into my mother's considerable stash of trash novels around the tender age of...oh...I was probably eight or ten, I don't think she was too happy about it--but that was mostly because I would squirrel the ones she wanted to read/was in the middle of reading away into my room and it would take a team of professional excavational spelunkers to find them again.

Second; in school I was always reading something under the desk/table when I was supposed to be paying attention, and while this ticked the teachers off, it wasn't until I'd switched from my regular fare (Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sweet Valley High, Babysitters' Club, Goosebumps, Wishbone, American Girl, Boxcar Children, Anne McCaffrey, Tamora Pierce, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.) to what was clearly soft-core porn that they attempted a full-on intervention.  Also, when I (in my early primordial flailing attempts at pre-otakuness) was reading the novelized versions of the Sailor Moon anime, I would get embarrassed and recover them with paper and pretend to be reading something more intelligent than watered-down cartoonish pap that couldn't even spell the word "whoa" (it seems that, even then, I was something of an elitist).

Third; my friend Kate (who I first met when she was a beleaguered summer camp counselor and I a whirling precocious seven-year-old hellion with a vivid imagination, high IQ and a penchant for biting people; over the past decade or so, she's been something of an amalgam of teacher, mentor, babysitter, godmother, sister, idol, and friend) once forbade me from reading The Lovely Bones until I was old enough; for the first time in the history of my life I actually did what I was told, and when it was on my summer reading list in high school, she gave me her copy.

I think that's it.  EDIT:  Ooh, ooh, also!  My friend Jessica B-L (I know waaay too many Jessicas) gave me her copy of the Necronomicon when she moved down to South North Carolina with her Iraq vet combat-medic husband; before that, I would flip through it when I was over at her parents' place (I thought--and still think--that it's the most adorable thing ever), and I would randomly pick a page and read melodramatically and she would freak out and tackle me and wrestle the book away (it didn't matter whether I was reading from "The Conjuration of the Fire God" or the Acknowledgements).

(Hee, downstairs I can hear my cat fussing and scratching in her labohratohree; three guesses what that is.  Socute. ♥)