First few grown-up books you ever read

[Magical Realist]

Mine were, I think in this order, "The Once And Future King" by T.H. White, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "Siddhartha", and "The Late Great Planet Earth." I was somewhat literately advanced for a 12 year old kid. I would read the used paperbacks my mom bought at the old bookstore on North Beach. Then the old man who ran the place got murdered one day, and sadly that was that.

[C C]

It was my brother's "scattered around the place" science fiction paperbacks that I first read. Which -- while featuring adults and adult themes -- would have nevertheless been considered crazy "adolescent literature" back in the past.[1]

I recall Leigh Brackett in an interview from the 1970s relating how she and other pulp speculative fiction writers of the 1940s would delight when they individually encountered another "fellow nut" in person, via the conversations that ensued. (Always retaining secrecy about that part-time occupation and area of interest.)

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Should that be less the case, today, it's purely due to living in the 21st-century -- where cordless smartphones, AI, robots, genetically altered organisms, pictures from rovers traveling on the surface of Mars, etc, are a prevalent part of reality.