Cyrano de Bergerac. Everytime I read the end, Niagara Falls.
Man, Where the Red Fern Grows is a killer. That was one my mom read aloud to us three kids on a roadtrip once. Had five people in the car, sobbing, Mom barely able to get through each sentence.
Sort of in a similar vein, there’s a short story in one of the James Herriott collections (I think it’s in All Creatures Great and Small), where he’s forced to put down an old dog who is an elderly poor man’s only friend. It’s unbearably sad, but the ending, when the old man offers him a cigar after Herriott has refused payment, breaks my heart.
sciguy, that scene with Fflewddur does the same thing to me.
I’ve read Watership Down a dozen times or more and I still can’t get through the end without bawling. I’m getting choked up just thinking about it.
Also, I had a really hard time plodding through the LOTR series the first time (probably about 15 years ago), but I gave them another chance after seeing FOTR on screen…I felt like I finally understood the gist of the story and had a better grasp of who the key players were. The second time around, I wept from Mount Doom to the Grey Havens. Egad.
Oh, James Herriot! I forgot one…he’s trying frantically to save a dog from mange, trying all sorts of treatments over weeks, and then he comes home and sees the dog in the headlights of his car. It hits him that there’s nothing more they can do for this beautiful dog, so he has to put her down.
Then, it turns out, if the dog had only been born a few years later, they could have treated her successfully.
I usually don’t cry when reading (or watching movies or TV, for that matter) unless it involves little kids. Anything involving little kids can make me cry without much trouble. Even stuff that isn’t sad but is just really cute or really happy makes me cry if it involves little kids.
The example that comes to mind most readily at the moment is when I read When the Air Hits Your Brain by Frank T. Vertosick Jr., MD. Dr. Vertosick recounts tales of his career in neurosurgery, and there’s a chapter about a little girl[sup]1[/sup] who was born with hydrocephaly, whose parents abandoned her to die at the hospital because they couldn’t bear to see it, but instead of dying in a few days as predicted, she lived for – I can’t remember if it was months or a year or more, but she was basically raised by the hospital staff until she finally died, and the whole scene completely tore me up.
[sup]1[/sup]This is all “as best I can recall,” since the book is packed away somewhere in the mountains of boxes around me that have yet to be unpacked from my move. Unless somebody else has a copy and/or remembers the details, I’ll have to find that book and verify exactly what happened and why it made me cry so much. Of course, re-reading it will make me cry all over again. I hope you people appreciate the sacrifices I go through for you!
The Fionavar Tapestry. I read it once a year and I always cry buckets. I cry when Dave remembers beating up on Vincent. I cry when Kim changes the Paraiko. I cry when Lancelot battles in the Grove, when the Goddess comes to Paul on the Tree, when Diarmuid steals Arthur’s battle from him. I cry when Kevin brings the spring back and all the Priestesses are howling, and suddenly the Rite Of Liadon changes from being an empty tradition into something real again, after all those years.
And in Ender’s Shadow, when Bean uses the intercom to give his message to the men on the ships.
And this one is silly, but in Anne of Ingleside, when Jem feels guilty for not giving Anne a real pearl necklace, that one gets me everytime.
Owen Meany and Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book.
Where the Red Fern Grows
Bridge to Terebithia
Old Yeller
And more recently The Fool’s Progress by Edward Abbey.
Have to mention, I hated Garp. What a stupid book.
John Irving seems to be a love-him-or-hate-him type of author. I don’t care for him myself, but I’m sure the posters who were moved by his books were deeply moved.
Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Chapter 20 left me blubbering like a baby the first time I read it.
I’ll cry at the drop of a hat when reading, so this could be a really long list. However a few stick out in the mind (though I had to quickly pop in at amazon to remind me of a few details)
The Duncton Wood books- William Horwood.
( Someone at amazon uk said that these books weren’t available in the US- is it true?) This is a series of 6 huge books chronicling the life and times of a community of moles (yes, moles!- no laughing at the back!) during some very dark days in their history. I read it as a young girl and although no particular scene stands out now, I do recollect several heart wrenching death scenes.
The Power of One- Bryce Courtney
A very moving book about a young black boy in Aparteid era South Africa who dreams of becoming a professional boxer. I remember crying a lot reading this book, but particularly at the part when
the boy’s trainer and best friend is brutally murdered by a racist policeman
but the winner is…
Possesing the Secret of Joy- Alice Walker
I seemed to have tears streaming down my face 90 % of the time when I was reading this book. I think because the suffering being portrayed in this book
is very real, and is being endured by thousands of women at this very moment, and so needlessly. It just got me in a very strange way and left a very deep mark.
Yeah, but I never did care for Captain Janeway. <rimshot>
I, too, cry when I read The Finovar Tapestry, but not half so much as when I read The Lions of Al-Rassan.
Kay has a new book coming out in a few days. I’m beside myself with the wanting.
Got to agree with this one.
But when I really need a cry, I go to Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beast of Eld, the single most romantic book ever written in my opinion. Her writing is so beautiful, I don’t know of a book of hers that hasn’t made me cry, but this one, her first, still gets me the most.
Charles DeLint is another who often causes my tearducts to work overtime, both his novels (Someplace To Be Flying comes immediately to mind) and his short stories.
And I sobbed so hard I had to stop reading while trying to finish Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom, the man who wrote Tuesdays With Morrie. That just hit me deep in the soul.
Books make me cry sometimes, but only once have I bawled…at the final “Floramor” scene in Ada by Vladimir Nabokov.
[hijack] Actually, I tend to either love Irving’s books or hate them. His best one by far is Owen Meany, so if you haven’t read that one, I do recommend it. Some of his others (Water Method Man, the 158 Pound Marriage, even *Cider House Rules * IMHO) are not particularly interesting. [/hijack]
I hardly ever cry at books or films, but pretty much the whole of “Goodnight Mr Tom” had me tearing up and at one point putting the book down to cry.
I don’t know about cry per se…
but ‘On the Beach’ hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the book but also the time/situation in life that I was in.
Art Spielman’s Maus was one of the few books that have made me cry.
I was suprised that some woman would risk her life to deliver Vlad’s letters to his wife in the other camp. Doing something so dangerous for no reward struck me as utter madness, and I wouldn’t have thought about doing it; it was then that I realized how terrible life was in Auswich, and I cried.
I actually made a list of things that make me cry or I can use to induce crying. There were more movies and songs than books, but a few books have made me cry.
Harry Potter 5 did, though for some reason only the second time through.
“Of mice and men” made me bawl and hate John Steinback for a very long time.
When I was a tween I had these books in the “One last wish” by Lurlene McDaniel I believe. They were about young people who had terminal illnesses and were given a chance to act on their last wish before they died… recently I found them on my shelf and wondered why I even had them, if anything was meant to induce crying they were.
And when I was a kid, there were a couple books. One of them was called I think “Teardrop tea” and was about this owl who made himself cry so he could have the delicacy of teardrop tea. Another one that made me sob was “Bread and jam for Francis”. Don’t ask.
Merla