Re:They were in high school before I quit reading every single book they checked out of the library--which is how I came to know and hate both The Polar Express and The Velveteen Rabbit.
Ha! when i was 13 or so, i read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth--and thought it was the raciest book i had ever read--(yeah, i grew in in NYC, but my parents did their best to protect me from many thing)
the book was filled with strange and sexy ideas --concubines (i looked that word up--i though i knew what it meant from context, but NO way would my mother smile at me reading books about people who had concubines! and opium.. people in the book took opium! (and there there was the passage after Onan has twin sons, and her husband gives her twin pearls (which she keeps--rather than wears) nestled between her twin swollen breast! wow did i think that was sexy!
a year or two later, i was reading the microbe hunters (a book she didn't approve of!) and i was reading about STD, but not about the sex part--more about the disease part, (as i recall, the transmittal part was covered by a simple sentence "caught by having (sexual) intercourse with an infected partner" nothing erotic there... but the science--that was riviting!
(the general policy was "no censorship"-- we were free to read anything we wanted.. but somehow, the microbe hunters kept getting helpfully returned to the library--it was years before i realize this was her way to discourage this book (i don't think she ever read it, but she might have looked at the chapter heading and say something about the fight against syphilis)
i know she hadn't read (and didn't read) most of the books we read --(she did actually read A Catcher in Rye--and couldn't see what the problem was.. (when i was a teen, it was banned in several school districts.) She counted on the nuns--if they didn't disapprove, she didn't. at some point, one of the parish priest must have told her the Microbe hunters was OK, and i finally finished reading the book.
