When I was in 4th grade, I read My Brother Sam is Dead. To this day it’s the only book I’ve ever read that’s made me cry.
She’s Come Undone, by Wally Lamb. A lot of what Pat Conroy writes has me in tears–most notably *Beach Music * and The Lords of Discipline.
And most of the Harry Potters, too, just basically when the aunt and uncle treat him like shit.
J.T. Leroy’s Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Leroy was a second generation truck-stop prostitute from the time he was 12 (his mother, who was 14 when she was born, hooked until she died) and both of these works are autobiographical fiction. The thought that ANY child would have to endure these things in his childhood just make me want to… well, cry. (I’d say that I wanted to beat the living shi-ite out of his mother, but many men did that many times [though not because she was such a horrible mother] and it certainly didn’t help the situation.)
While not a book, Truman Capote’s autobiographical short-stories A Thanksgiving Visitor and A Christmas Memory (both about the time he spent as a boy living with his “simple” aunt, quite probably the only time in his life when he was happy) bring me to tears every time I read them.
As for novels, the last chapter of War & Remembrance hit me hard, when
Natalie Jastrow Henry, having physically recuperated somewhat six months after surviving Auschwitz, is reunited with her four year old son whom she’d assumed was dead.
Not too terribly strange. I’ve cried at a few books, but nothing left me so devastated as the early Orson Scott Card novel Songmaster.
Total catharsis. Astonishing.
Oh, yeah. That one too.
And if we’re including short stories, there’s one by Theodore Sturgeon called Slow Sculpture that I’ve been trying to track down for ages. Beautiful, brilliant, and I cried for hours.
I’m not one for crying over a book, but Steinbeck can put a manly lump in your throat.
Not only Of Mice and Men, which has been mentioned by several posters, but also The Grapes of Wrath. In particular, I’m thinking of the chapter where the hard-boiled waitress at the truck stop soft-heartedly sells the Joads a loaf of bread and some candy below cost (practically giving it away), and the big-hearted trucker at the counter, seeing this, quietly leaves the waitress a huge tip. Something about the “We’re all in this together” sentimentality of that chapter gets to me.
So, I’m not the only one who does that, huh? I simply can’t ever bear to reread Bridge to Terabithia because I know what a wreck I’d be afterwards.
Julie
The first book that ever made me cry was Primrose Day by Carolyn Haywood. It was about a little girl who was evacuated to the U.S. from England during WWII. She always had primroses on her birthday and believed they didn’t have them in the U.S.
And I’m surprised Little Women hasn’t come up yet (unless I missed it?) When I was 10 every single girl I knew was reading it and weeping.
The bit in Fionavar Tapestry where you find out about what happened to the Elves. I have a soft spot for Elves, and that just kills me. I don’t even know if I could re-read it, even though I loved the trilogy to pieces. About Diarmud too, goodness, that makes me weepy. Heck the whole thing is overly emotional for me!
I just re-read Little Women. I forgot how potent the sad part is. Good grief.
I think I cried when I first read Lolita… the part where Humbert says she had nowhere else to go. Godawful. Brilliant writing. Hurts to think about it.
Various parts of George. R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire until I got the clue not to get too attached to anyone. Yargh.
Gaudy Night when Lord Peter tells Harriet that all he had to offer her was Oxford, and it was already hers.
I remember reading this book! I don’t remember crying about it, but it definitely sticks out in my mind, especially when they go on a picnic (?) and there is a patch of primroses there.
I cry at a lot of things…^^() A lot of the aforementioned books (Where the Red Fern Grows, Flowers for Algernon, Bridge to Terabithia, the last two HP books, Watership Down etc.) have done it for me, but I would like to add Animist, by Eve Forward, and the Seventh Gate, the last of the Death Gate books.
I don’t know if the books are available now, but I picked up the first (in paperback) some twenty-five years ago or so. I have no strong memories of it. Sorry.
The book that gets me every time is **Figures of Earth ** by James Branch Cabell. The ending is very difficult for me to read. Also Chapter XXXIII of the next book in the series, The Silver Stallion. I read these both at an impressionable age, and still get choked up just thinking about “The Economics of Coth.”
I keep what few Cabell books I have been able to collect on the “good shelf,” near the Peake, Tolkein, and Lovecraft.
Of course I bawl at the end of LOTR. Especially the very last line. It’s almost required, isn’t it, if you’re a LOTR fan?
I’ve read several books aloud to my husband, and one of the first was Anne Of Green Gables (he’s undereducated and hadn’t read it) and when Matthew died we both lost it. I couldn’t finish the chapter without a ten-minute break and he was sobbing. The same thing happened at the end of Beauty, by Sheri S. Tepper- when the main character lies down beside her true love, at the end of her battle to preserve all the good in the world, with the hope that someday they’ll reawaken and be able to be together…
I’m crying, now. Damn.
Bridge To Teribithia, Deerkskin by Robin McKinley, Lilith by George MacDonald*. Watership Down. Lots of others I can’t remember. I’m such a watering can.
The Wars by Timothy Findlay. What a sad, bleak story about a misunderstood soul fighting in WWI. The final lines, describing a photo of Robert Ross and his sister taken before the war, still make me tear up:
Robert and Rowena with Meg: Rowena seated astride the pony - Robert holding her in place. On the back is written: ‘Look! You can see our breath!’ And you can.
I have to teach a class on this in two weeks, and I’m not touching the last five pages because I don’t want to start crying in front of my students.
Aw crap, I can remember reading that story at nine or ten and just totally breaking down. Depressed me for days. It’s also the second-to-last story in the Martian Chronicles, though I think it might be slightly different there.
Shizuko’s Daughter by Kyoko Mori, about the daughter of a woman who commits suicide in Japan in the 60s. It’s an absolutely gorgeous book.
Bridge to Terabithia, of course. I read it once when I was a child and cried at the end. I read it a second time last year and cried all the way through because I knew what was coming. Even so, I wouldn’t change a word of it.
One that got to me was Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” – the idea that Mike is really still there, just so shell-shocked he’s (metaphorically) hiding in a corner, rocking back and forth and back and forth… <sniff>
I was just cold with horror at that part, but when Leyse realized that after Lancelot, she had nothing more to live for, and she became “the first in her people for past a thousand years to reach the world the Weaver had shaped for the Children of Light alone,” I lost it.
Of Mice and Men- I had never seen the movies and I had NO idea what I was in for. Finished it while home alone. I was sobbing when my mom and step-dad got home… I told them why I was bawling and my step-dad just nodded.
Lord of the Flies- Again, I had no idea what I was in for… poor Piggy
Mick Hart was Here- I read it in grade school. Story told by a girl whose brother recently died in a bike accident.
Dragons of Spring Dawning When Flint dies…
Where the Red Fern Grows of course…
I can’t think of any more right now.
I’ll admit to crying only once at a book. That’s the end to Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I was, upon both readings, so overcome by the scope of despair, the magnitude of hopelessness, the futility of human endeavor, that I lost myself.
I come close when I read Brave New World as well, the fate of the Savage bringing me there. Also, one of the short stories compiled into Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, “There will come soft rains”.
There is something epic, terrifying and sad about those stories that drives my mind into places it would rather not go.
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. There’s just an incredible shrieking aloneness to this book, I don’t know how to explain it but it left me crying for a day or so, off and on, after I’d read it.
Corny, perhaps, but effective:
Asimov’s short story “The Ugly Little Boy”
Stephen King’s Carrie