Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I promised phrasemuffin an account of my introduction to the wonderful world of Neil Gaiman. This is really a tale of Dad and I reaching an agreement regarding the sharing of literature, and it begins with Terry Pratchett.

I was exposed to Terry Pratchett fairly young, with Dad reading me Truckers/Diggers/Wings, and giving me The Carpet People to read. I was fascinated by Dad's bright and colourful Discworld collection, and nagged for many years to be allowed to read them. When I was about twelve, he gave in. I started with The Colour of Magic, which was a fairly good read but nothing on the later books. The pitfalls of sharing books with your daughter soon became obvious to Dad:
The Colour of Magic: describes the Gods on Cori Celesti as enjoying "warring and whoring".
12 year old Amy: Daddy, what's w-hor-ing?
Dad: what's what?
12 year old Amy: W-HOR-ING, Dad. The Gods on Cori Celesti do it!
Dad, going mysteriously red: oh, um, er... fighting over women!
12 year old Amy: nods, accepting this explanation. Within a year a Tamora Peirce book makes it perfectly obvious to her what w-hor-ing actually is. The shock! daddy lied!

Having adjusted to Terry Pratchett, I read Pratchett & Gaiman, Good Omens, with little drama. Then, when I was fourteen or fifteen, Dad got hold of Smoke and Mirrors. He adored it. It was cool. He read me bits aloud- "Nicholas Was" being one, and he permitted me to read one to myself- i think it was the one where Mrs Whittacker finds the Grail. And he proceeded to rave about the Snow White interpretation at the end of the book. But would he let me read it? Oh no. Whyever not, i wonders? No explanations was I getting from him... the book went back to the library. The second time he borrowed it, I badgered him endlessly. Why couldn't I read it? Hadn't Mum given up censoring my reading years ago? The problem, it turned out, wasn't the idea of me reading it, but the idea of him giving it to me.
Problem solved. Smoke and Mirrors placed on order from library, to arrive while Dad was away on a work trip. Smoke and Mirrors read. Smoke and Mirrors turned out to include Sci-Fi Porn. And the Snow White story was darkly sexy. My Dad read this????
Dad came home, found Smoke and Mirrors on the table. Looked at it. Looked at me.
Dad: you been reading Neil Gaiman?
Me: yeah. Thought you might like to read it again, so I left it out.
*a Look is exchanged*
Dad: did you like it?
Me: yeah, it was great! I liked the one where the old lady got the Grail...
*and the conversation is steered into safe territory, and Sci Fi Porn is not mentioned at all until last year*

with that out of the way, Dad and I proceeded to form the Dad and Amy Book Collective, for the mutual sharing of the works of Mssrs Pratchett, Adams, and Gaiman. Only one further interference was made into my reading habits, when Sue Woolmer was going to lend me Clan of the Cave Bear and then had second thoughts, because of a rape scene, and leant it to my parents, who read it and all its sequels with great enthusiasm but wouldn't let me touch it. I found this rather annoying, because I knew I had been reading Anne McCaffrey with her telepathic dragon orgies and enormously well endowed aliens, and I knew I had been reading JV Jones, which had all kinds of odd things in it, but if I trotted these out to support my point, it might have backfired and resulted in more book bans. So I bided my time and I still haven't got around to reading Clan of the Cave Bear.
I did take great joy in telling Dad, as I handed him Sara Douglass' Crucible series (the first of which was so well written from the point of view of its mysogynistic-come-gynephobic protagonist that it took me a month to finish it because it kept convincing me that I, was a woman, was evil; and the second of which has that lovely episode where the two husbands hand their wives over to be gang-raped), that he should under no circumstances let his wife read them, and that he should bear in mind that this was the sort of thing I was reading when they were trying to keep me away from Jean M Auel.
He enjoyed the Crucible immensely. He never commented on what I'd said to him, and that's the way it should stay.