Books that made you cry

Last part of The House at Pooh Corner hits me right in the feels, makes me tear up everytime I read it with my daughter.

The only one I can recall was some book about a horse that I read as a child. The horse dies at the end. I was sitting on the living room floor crying and my mother said “Did the horse die?” I thought she was the smartest person in the world at that point. Otherwise, nah.

Saw the thread title and came in to post “Art of Racing in the Rain” but I see Catnoe beat me to it. I’m pretty stoic when it comes to tearing up, especially when reading something, but that book had me in a puddle of tears.

Knew it was coming, cried anyway.

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams is the saddest book ever written.

Stone Fox is another kid’s book that does it to me.

It’s just awfully sad. :frowning:

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

+infinity. I cried harder reading The Road than I’ve ever cried at any form of entertainment.

I Heard The Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven
Watership Down by Richard Adams

Anne of Green Gables, near the end. I’ve read it a number of times over the years without incident, but re-read it yesterday when I downloaded it for free. Geez! Maybe it’s my age but and I’ve gone all nostalgic, but I had great drippy tears at the one part; you know it if you’ve read it!

Not a flat out cry, but good and choked up ( ahem…lump in my throat, No, I’m not crying…) at the end of 11/22/63 by Stephen King.

Year of Wonders - flat out, ugly cry, on a plane, no less.

Angela’s Ashes – just let me die

I can’t tell, Father, I can’t.
But you could tell St. Frances, couldn’t you?
He doesn’t help me anymore.

Can I please put in a short story?

The Man Who Traveled in Elephants, by Robert A. Heinlein. I don’t cry at the big reveal at the end, but at the description of the veterans passing in review.

The end of The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. I was getting pissed off at the book until the last couple pages. Shouldn’t have read the end of that book at work, I had to explain to my co-workers why I was crying…

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler, but they were tears of joy, actually.

The first book to ever make me actually cry was the last pages of The Grapes of Wrath. There are some that have made me tear up. I could barely see thru the tears at the ending of The Road. I was despondent for days.

High emotion discussed matter-of-factly is the key to my sluice gates.

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal
The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert - the middle story of the three usually finds me doing the finger across the top of the cheek routine at several points.

Books get me more than films, but radio plays are by far the worst. I welled up a bit when I read The Snow Goose, but the radio version had me nigh inconsolable for a while.

Some books have made me cry, but only two books have ever made me weep.

  1. The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan. It was about how the protagonist seeks to understand the intense, conflicted relationship with her mother in terms of her mother’s past experiences. I had a very troubled relationship with my mother and the book not only made me see the situation from a new angle, it really triggered that vulnerable little kid feeling so many of us still get from time to time.

  2. Maus by Art Spiegelman. A sensitive graphic novel about the Holocaust. It won a special Pullitzer Prize and now I know why. I didn’t cry while I was reading it, but I didn’t put it down. As soon as I finished -at 3am- I closed the book and just wept. For a long time. In that moment he made the Holocaust into something that was not a Jewish experience, but a human experience. I felt like I was weeping for all of humanity. And he did it all with cute little animals.

The Internet is a Playground.

Couldn’t have said it better.

I’ll add The Velveteen Rabbit - I was 6, gimme a break :wink:

Old Yeller, many years ago.

Today? Horton Hatches The Egg. Don’t judge me.