The holiday has left me in a bright & shiny mood, so it seems like the appropriate time to talk about sad books. (We'll save the list of books that make you cry of laughter for a more dire time, like... November.) These books moved me, even if they didn't move me to tears, so in case you've been having too much of a good time:
Sad Childhood Tie Wilson Rawls, WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS/ Katherine Paterson, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. I wasn't allowed to have a dog growing up, but I did have a best friend.
Sad And True That You Can't Put Down Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, RANDOM FAMILY. LeBlanc followed this Bronx family for over 10 years and you want them to improve their lives so badly, even when it seems like they're stuck in the same self-destructive cycles. This book is a nonfiction Tolstoy novel, and everyone should read it, but it's hard to take sometimes.
Sad But Beautiful Elizabeth Hay, LATE NIGHTS ON AIR. I named this my favorite book of 2008 and at its conclusion felt what the Portuguese call saudade -- an immense longing for the characters and the situation that could never come to pass again.
Sad... Or Frustrating? If my mom were making this list COLD MOUNTAIN would probably top the sad heap as the saddest. Without giving away the ending, when I finished the book, I just felt fooled. I would put MY SISTER'S KEEPER into this pile as well.
Saddest (And True) If you can read Rob Sheffield's LOVE IS A MIX TAPE and walk away unmoved, you should probably put yourself on the transplant list for a heart. Sheffield and his wife met as DJs and fell in love through music, and then one day she fell over dead, just like that. He uses the device of mix tapes he made and they exchanged, and I meant to make some of them in playlist form, really I did, but it just got really dusty in my apartment, okay?!
Has a book ever made you cry... that you can admit?
5 days ago
6 comments:
"Sofie's Choice" made me cry.
How about ROBYN'S BOOK, by Robyn Miller? You too can hitch along for a ride with a teenage girl dying from cystic fibrosis, watching all of her CF friends die slowly and painfully, and knowing the inevitable conclusion!
I remember my mom crying while she read to me THE BIRDS' CHRISTMAS CAROL, by Kate Douglas Wiggin, but that's about all I remember from it. My mom also cried when she read THE FACTS AND FICTIONS OF MINNA PRATT, by Patricia MacLaghlan, which surprised me greatly, and when I said to her that I didn't think it was a very sad book, she said to me that that was because I wasn't a mother.
I think the most recent time I cried when reading a book was for JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, by Susanna Clarke.
I had no love for Strange/Norrell, but I am widely known to lack imagination.
I'd love to drop in some new tear-inducing book, but I think Red Fern is the most notable for me.
Red Fern was pretty damn sad.
The Remains of the Day, The Great Gatsby, Atonement, A River Runs Through It and The Things They Carried were probably the books that effected me the most as an adult.
A more recently read tear-jerker for me was "Caspian Rain." It makes me feel sad just to think about it.
oh my goshh
i absolutely love all the books by Jodi PIcoult (although i've only read like 5 of them so far)
but my two favorites are
My sister's keeper
and
Nineteen Minutes.
Jodi's other books also moved me but didnt bring me to tears.
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