Metalhead , I am glad I am not the only one with a tissue and a sniffle while reading LOTR. I was too embarrassed to admit it till I read your post.
I also 2nd Watership Down, it was so sad.
For me it would have to be “Goodnight Mister Tom”, “Grayfriars Bobby” and the part in “Heidi” where the grandfather asks for forgiveness
I bawl every time I read the following books:
- Bridge to Terabithia
- Where the Red Fern Grows
- Podkayne of Mars (with original, sad ending)
-
Diary of a Young Girl (And when I get done crying, I start crying all over again, because it’s real.
)
A Prayer For Owen Meany
brilliant. Also by John Irving, “The Hotel New Hampshire”
“The Bridges of Madison County” come to mind first.
I cry easily, but this book affected me for a couple of days and I couldn’t even pick up either of my two other books.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” cause me to tear up several time.
Some really great tear-jerking books on this thread! Wonderful thread! 
I was deeply moved by the Lord of the Rings too. I felt sadness when Gandalf apparently fell, but it was still an exciting story-line, so I kept reading.
I was getting the sniffles when Sam announced to Rosy that he was back; because it’s such a homely contrast to all the astounding sights he’s seen.
But when I read the Appendices, and came to the part where Legolas and Gimli take ship together with the comment ‘and thus came an end to the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle Earth’, then everything welled up inside.
Blub.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. The story of a missionary family in the Congo in 1959, and how their experience in Africa impacts their lives for the next 40 years.
I would have read it in one sitting if I could have, but I had to take breaks to bawl my eyes out.
Don’t miss the part about the ants. —shudder—:eek:
Just finished Paul Quarrington’s The Spirit Cabinet, and I suppose I should have expected it. Slipped in with an apparently trivial and slap-stick story, an ending that had me practically bawling. (Couldn’t put it down after I got about half-way through it, so I ended up finishing it at almost five a.m., and sleep-deprivation undoubtedly contributed to my emotional vulnerability.)
Quarrington has that gift that Vonnegut demonstrated – deceptively simple narrative, often very funny, yet profoundly human and touching.
“Deathbird Story”: the story within the story “Ahbhu” by Harlan Ellison, about a man whose dog dies, always makes me choke up, even when reading it to my class
The Sparrow–Mary Doria Russell (I finished it at work and had to adjourn to the bathroom for a few minutes so as not to embarrass myself)
Tigana–Guy Gavriel Kay
The Mists of Avalon–Marion Zimmer Bradley
Sandman: The Wake–Neil Gaiman
I Know This Much is True–Wally Lamb
Another one for A Prayer For Owen Meany
John Irving can always be counted on for a good weep. (I don’t know of any other wrestling-fixated authors that are so cussed sensitive.)
I think that tomorrow I’ll pick up Trying To Save Piggy Sneed again. It’s been quite a while since I read it, and I don’t remember much detail about many of the stories in it.
I remember that the title story got to me in a big way, though, and I know that I got the pages damp.
The movie that was vaguely based on A Prayer For Owen Meany almost made me cry, too. :Scratches head: Oh yeah, Simon Birch. Closer to tears of rage, though. What a travesty!
I remember Ken Kesey explaining himself to David Letterman about why he’d never seen the film adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Dave asked him if he wasn’t curious at all to see how it turned out, and Kesey said something like, “Well, Dave, if you knew that someone was raping your daughter in the street, would you feel compelled to watch, just to see exactly how they did it?” I’ve never sympathized with Kesey about this, but if John Irving said the same thing with regard to the Simon Birch fiasco, it would make sense to me. They pulled off some sort of Bizarro-world alchemy with that one, transforming Gold into something unspeakably foul.
Off the top of my head:
The Colour Purple
Lord of the Rings
The Shining (When Danny thinks: “I’m only five…doesn’t it matter that I’m only five?”)
Oh yeah, “Microserfs” made me bawl. The ending was just so happily bittersweet. Hello jed.
I can recall being pretty racked up over “Talk Before Sleep” by Elizabeth Berg and, for a similar reason, “The Saving Graces” by Patricia Gaffney. I’m talking bawl-your-eyes out crying.
Recently, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold had me pretty messed up. It’s an excellent book. I think I might have also cried a bit at the end of “Bel Canto” even though I knew it couldn’t really end any other way.
I love you guys-- this one thread has mapped out my reading schedule for 2003 in a way that the TLS could never quite manage.
I’m a rabid bookworm, and despite all the reading I’ve done, only one book has ever succeeded in getting me to shed tears. It’s a book that has already been mentioned on this thread, but I’ll say the name again anyways.
Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls. Read it for the first time when I was in the sixth grade, and I was a mess when I finished it.
Prince of Morning Bells, by Nancy Kress. It’s been ten years since I read it and I still get choked up thinking about poor Chessie.
People of the Whistling Waters,by Mardi Oakley Medawar, story about the Crow Indian Nation… that book made me cry several time while reading it…also, Charlottes Web, I cried when I read it as a kid and cried when I read it to my daughter years later…
A Taste of Blackberries by Doris Buchanan Smith.
Okay. Maybe I didn’t cry, but it made me feel berry, berry sad.
Oh, and Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman by Clifford B. Hicks. But only because I was, at that age, a sucker for happy endings.
Pawn in frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett. The chess game does me in every time