I recently read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell and I loved it. It is really well written and totally enthralling,
but…
I found it a very difficult read. I actually couldn’t read some of the passages, and wrestled several times with just putting it down, but I reckoned I had to find out what happened.*
It literally gave me nightmares, but I’m still glad I read it.
Anyone ever had a similar experience?
What was the book and why did it affect you?
I can’t say what distressed me without giving the plot away, other than to say that I think that I’m a breastfeeding mother had a lot to do with my reaction, but if you’re wondering… A major plot point deal with the murder of infants, and one passage in particular describes newborn twins being taken from their mother (she thinks they’re going to new lives- we know they’re going to die).
The Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson is wildly popular right now, even though there’s some graphic and disturbing sexual violence in the first book. I liked it–I don’t feel the need to read it again, but I liked it–but that scene was really, really hard to get through.
And of course there’s Bridge to Terabithia, but that may be another thing entirely.
I tend to be the exception to the rule stated by Don Marquis that “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” I imagine a lot of people here are similarly exceptional.
Tolkien’s (or should I say Tolkiens’) Children of Hurin is incredibly depressing. But the writing is just so beautiful in places that you don’t even care. Or rather, you do care, too much, but you still are glad for having read it.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It kept getting more and more horrible and I knew where it all was going to end, but I couldn’t stop reading it. Some of the images stayed with me for weeks. I kind of want to see the movie now, but kinda don’t want to put myself through it.
Into Thin Air about rhe everest climbing disaster.
The Poisonwood Bible about a zealous missionary family in Africa
both cut too close to home and I won’t reread them ans I normally rweread books. both were really good books that I would recommend as well. Even posting this kinda gives me the heebie jeebies
Like China Guy, my first thought was Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, as well as Into the Wild. But the book of his that disturbed me the most (and pissed me the hell off), but was written quite compellingly, is Under the Banner of Heaven.
Also, I should mention Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.
Similarly, I feel that if something really makes you feel, a lot of people dislike it. I’m always amazed at the people who talk about disliking a book that was very sad or involved a death that upset them. For me to be affected by a book, it has to be well written.
Plus, I think I’ve read so many things I’ve gotten jaded. I didn’t bat an eye at any of the stuff in the first Millennium book. I didn’t read the rest, mainly because I just wasn’t that into them.
I love the short story “What Maise Knows.” I love it, a very good short story.
I will never read it again. I don’t know why but it really bothered me for some reason. What makes it worse is my brain likes to start thinking about it as I’m starting to fall asleep, and if I let that happen I’ll stay up all night.
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Her descriptions of what happened to Ginger and later on, Beauty, broke my heart. But I still love the book. The final book of the LAST HERALD MAGE series by Mercedes Lackey made me bawl too.
I’ll second this, but unlike China Guy I have re-read it twice.
And I’ll add “She’s Come Undone” and “I Know This Much is True”, both by Wally Lamb. The protagonists in both are just so broken and in such a raw, human way.
Orwell’s 1984 had that effect on me when I read it in the late 1970s. Creeped me totally the fuck out. It felt like some factions in society were using it as a goddam blueprint.
Stephen King’s Misery. I dabble in writing a bit myself, so the idea of having someone burn the only copy of what you believe is your best writing makes me cringe. I actually had to put it down a couple times, it disturbed me so much. Nonetheless, I thought it was the best King book I’d ever read.
The book Was by Geoff Ryman is the first book to upset me (I was about 20 at the time) and I cried my fucking eyes out. Really really upset me and has totally ruined any enjoyment of the Wizard of Oz for me (you need to read the book to see what I’m talking about).
A couple of Will Self’s books have dealt with unpleasant material and I couldn’t finish them because of it - in Dorian one of the characters is in hospital dying of AIDS which, as a gay guy, hits a bit too close to home for me, and I had to stop reading. Another one, How the dead live, was all about death and partly a woman coming to face hers, and at that point I hadn’t come to terms with my own mortality enough to be able to read it. I should probably try both of them another time as they were good, just, unsettling.
More recently John dies at the end is a pretty disturbing book and some of the imagery in it made my skin crawl. There is a bit at the end where David’s TV comes on and it looks like the people from Shit Narnia are going to break through, but they don’t that had me reading transfixed in absolute horror.
Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore’s account of his brother Gary’s execution in Shot in the Heart. Very hard going but shit he can write. He begins:
I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave.