Slight hijack, but do you mean the stephanie meyer book? is that good?
Back to the topic at hand, last book I cried over was The Lovely Bones - scenes already been mentioned - when the father smashes his bottle/boats collection.
Oh, yeah. Remind me about Smokey. Thaaanks.
Honestly? The first book that came to mind:
Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant.
The sequence with Juliek’s last concert in Night. Absolutely heartwrenching, the way he holds on to humanity in such a hellish environment. Gets me every time.
All of Oscar Wilde’s short stories, but especially The Happy Prince.
The Last Unicorn, when Amalthea transforms back into a unicorn and leaves, but is forever changed.
Owen Meaney. Every time. Many others, but nothing gets be bawling like OM.
This was my first, too, at about the same age.
The Deathly Hallows - Snape’s patronus broke my heart.
A Game of Thrones
When Bran and Rickon and the maester get the raven about Ned’s death.
When Daenarys realizes the Drogo she knew is gone forever, so she smothers him to death out of mercy (his mind is gone but his body is technically alive).
I came in to mention “Algernon” as well.
Asher Lev, yes. Wonderful story, wonderful, wonderful writing.
The Time Traveller’s Wife didn’t do it for me. Neat book, but not tearjerking material for me.
That was the gol-darned strangest book. I loved how he finally managed to communicate with the dog, and I remember tearing up at the end,too.
The scene with the group that performed surgeries on dogs to make them “intelligible” was creepy as heck.
The ending of “The End of FIRPO in the World,” a short story by George Saunders, absolutely wrecks me. I re-read it recently, having only remembered that it was sad. By the end I was sobbing. Holy cow.
Same here DB. I was… maybe in the 3rd grade when I read that. My Mom laughed at me when she found out what was making me cry. We haven’t got along much since then.
Another two places from a short story.
I Am Nothing by Eric Frank Russell (I think.)
The “letter” that the little girl wrote and the ending…
“Victory over self is always full.”
Owen Meany: Damn you John Irving…I was reading it on a plane!
“O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.” Wm Shakespeare
The end of Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was a tear-jerker too, especially in the light of it of it being his final novel.
Also in Night, the scene where a child is hanged by the Nazis and those watching see the death of God.
I weep every time.
Sarah’s Key.
What’s worse than being Jewish in Paris on July 16th, 1942? Worse than being rounded up, held for days without food and water, and then taken to a concentration camp? Worse than having your mother forceably dragged from you and sent to Auschwitz?
Locking your little brother in the secret closet when the police came, in an attempt to hide him, and keep him safe… only to realize that you would never get back home to unlock the closet and let him out.
After finishing that book, I was so horrified that I had to retreat to a hot shower where I could fall to my knees and bawl so that my family wouldn’t hear me falling apart over a story in a book. I nearly threw up, I was crying so hard.
Damn. My mother in law needs to stop sending me these sorts of books. The Nanny Diaries was bad enough. Comedy, my ass. I cried for that little boy, too.
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up, your fathers passing”
Another vote here for Little Women – when Beth dies, of course, and Jo’s poem about the four chests in the attic, and the very end, when she and the professor finally get together. (I read that passage at my sister’s wedding, and I could barely get through it.)
*To Dance with the White Dog * – Yikes.
I’m a weepy reader, too. My son always zeroed in on it when I was reading to him. “Mom – you sound like you’re going to cry!” One that really caught me by surprise was when Akela dies in The Jungle Book.
Alice the Goon, I checked I Love You Forever out of the library exactly once, about 10 years ago. Never again. I couldn’t take it. A couple of months ago, our minister read the book as the “children’s moment” in the service. From my vantage point in the choir, I look out at the congregation, and I saw, as I expected, lots of Kleenex. I was touched by the number of men I saw furtively wiping their eyes.