See, I’m glad for this thread, because I hate things that make me cry. So I can make a note of the books I haven’t already read, and avoid them. My list is kind of … well, besides being short, there aren’t exactly heaps of classics included.
Anyway, the first time I read Fried Green Tomatoes I just about died, I mean, I saw the movie first, and it ends so happily… but the book does not, no no no… especially how Evelyn looks at the old woman’s things and thinks, this is all that’s left of someone’s whole life, just a shoebox full of papers and things.
Like I said, I just about died.
Also, when I read Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, (yes, the one by Pamela Des Barres) and her father is suffering and then dies, I bawled big time. I had just lost my father recently and it hurt so bad to read it happening to someone else.
Oh yes- I forget most of John Irving’s tearjerkers. The scene where the family recovers at Jenny’s after the accident, and I kept thinking, “Where’s Walt!? Where’s Walt!?” And then the line is so killer: “Wrestlers have strong necks, but the children of wrestlers do not.” Yeesh! And then when Garp says, “I mish him so much!” Makes me sob everytime.
Also, The Cider House Rules is painfully sad for me. Starting with Homer’s first fatherly kiss from Dr. Larch, I cry for most of the rest of the novel. The line, “I love nothing and no one as much as I love Homer Wells,” kills me. When Homer leaves, I sob. The ending (“There is nothing wrong with Homer Wells’ heart.”) is so sad as well.
In The Hotel New Hampshire, I cried really hard when Mother and Egg died. I mean, who expected it? And then Lilly (“Just not big enough. Sorry.”). The ending, when John waxes poetic on imagining new dreams as quickly as the old ones die is terribly sad stuff too.
And A Prayer For Owen Meany? Forget it. I sob so hysterically at the end, I have to take out my contacts.
Delphica, if it makes you feel better, I once cried loudly and passionately in front of my entire fourth grade class when we were singing “One Moment In Time” by Whitney Housten. It just made me sad, okay? I was ridiculed for years.
The end of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie gets me – how Hurstwood completely gives up and commits suicide (“What’s the use? He said weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.”); how Carrie has acquired all the “things” she once wanted, but is still lonely. She doesn’t even realize Hurstwood’s fate.
I HATED “Animal Farm” when we were forced to read it in school, and it was mostly because of the Boxer episode. I was in my “horsy stage” that a lot of young girls have gone through.
dlb and MrVisible mentioned “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants” I leak tears every time I read that one, not at the final scene but at one earlier in the Big Parade. “Johnny thought back to '44 when he had first seen them march, old men and young boys, because the proper “shooters” were away to war. And of something that should not be on Broad Street in Philadelphia on the first day of January, men riding in the parade because, merciful Heaven forgive us, they could not walk.”
LotR—Sam leaving ‘dead’ Frodo on Mordor.
Jude Deveraux wrote a romace novel called Remembrance and I was wholly unprepared. Escaptist fun, past lives, but two children are manipulated all though their adolescence and all they really want is to love each other. They end up blaming each other because they can’t see how they were being used. In their final scene, the desperation and despair made me put down the book and sob.
Fiction doen’t really do it for me, although I have had to put several books down because my heart is aching so much (Spy who came in from the Cold, Ender’s Game).
On the non-fiction front, I have recently read two accounts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Afica, one by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Chairman of the commission (No future without forgiveness) and the other by a white, female, Afrikaner radio-journalist called Anitjie Krog (Country of my skull). Both accounts include large extracts of testimony to the commission, and aften moved me to tears. As a white South African who grew up under the Apartheid regeime, I was sheltered from the truth of the atrocities that were being committed by both sides in the struggle for freedom. It broke my heart to discover what people were going through, the terrible things that they had to endure, and the thought that it was people just like me who were committing these acts of murder, rape and torture was almost too much. To realise the evil of which humankind is capable left me sobbing more than once.
Having said that, both books move from the place of despair to one of hope for the future, of forgiveness and reconcilliation, so the reading of them is highly recommended, perhaps even more so after Sept 11…
Well, I’ve got to say, that I cry at a lot of books; I guess I’m an overly emotional guy.
But, I do have some specific tear-jerkers. When I get home I can look through my “library” to refresh my memory, but for now I’ll say the two books I completed most recently certainly did it for me.
The Lord of the Rings, which I have read numerous times, and always gets me in different places. This time it was when Treebeard and the Ents are marching off to war, and he tells Merry and Pipin that, basically, the Ents know they are dying, and their time has passed, and this will be the last march of the Ents (I’m not paraphrasing very well at all, but trust me, it’s very tragic).
To Kill a Mockingbird, which I just finished last night. Also made me cry quite a bit, but certainly the emotional climax was when… oh, maybe I should say… SPOILER HERE!!!
the emotional climax is when Atticus and Scout are talking about why Heck Tate decided to officially call Bob Ewell’s death an accident and not bring Arthur Radley into the limelight, and Scout says, “Well Atticus, that’d be like killing a mocking bird” (or something close to that). I had to put the book down for a minute or so.
If it’s any consolation, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever read, and I’m not especially partial to horses. Everyone dies, but Boxer lived and died very well.
I think I got a little sniffly at that one during a very touching scene of loyalty among the fighters(those usually get me, all the bonding and comraderie). I believe it is when Theoden is dying and Eowyn is sorely injured as well. Merry is lying there exhausted and not far from death himself, but he is still thinking of some way to help them.
But I can’t believe no one has mentioned one of the mother of all tear-jerkers, and it’s great literature to boot!
Les Miserables
Gawd, I’ve read it about a dozen times, I’ve seen the musical a couple times and I own the soundtrack in several different performances/languages(it’s beautiful in French BTW). I still get misty at the end.
Well, I have not read the book, but I’ve seen the musical four times. Every time the mother (Epinine? I’m blanking on her name) sings “I Dreamed a Dream” I lose it. “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.” Yeesh.
You know, no one has mentioned Shakespeare, so I feel the need to share. Two speeches always make me cry: In Twelfth Night, when Viola is dressed as Cesario and speaks with the Duke of love:
(I typed that from memory, so it might not be 100% accurate, but it’s close).
That always kills me because I think we’ve all sat and waited “like patience,” smiling at sadness because it’s all we can do. I even wrote a poem about it, about how sometimes we know that grief is coming and we just have to wait for it, welcome it, and then let it go when it’s time.
Also, in Antony and Cleopatra, after the disastrous Battle of Actium during which A & C have joined forces against Octavius Caesar and are winning, but Cleopatra for some reason turns back and Antony follows her. He thus loses the battle.
Well, there’s this horribly sad scene afterward wherein Antony and Cleopatra cannot even look at each other for shame and embarrassment, and they talk through their servants. Finally, Cleopatra says, “I did not think you would follow me.” And Antony replies:
(I’m sure I messed up the feet in that, but you get the idea).
After he says this, Antony tells her he will have to backtrack, make ammends, and he knows full well that he will lose his stake as leader of one-third of the world. But he still kisses her and says that all is well. What love! How terribly, terribly sad.
Finally, in Romeo and Juliet, the part where I always cry is after they’ve spent the night together, and Romeo must leave. Juliet says the birdcall they hear is a nightengale, to convince Romeo that he can stay. “Believe me love, it was the nightengale.” And then Juliet says,
I can hear so clearly Romeo’s heartbreak when he says, “It was the lark.” I can imagine how sad he must have been, and that line sounds so final, so desperate, that I cry for the rest of the play.
I warned you all that I cry an awful lot. And I haven’t even listed all the books that make me cry.
Fantine. The musical doesn’t do the woman justice. In the musical she sells her necklace, which was precious to her, then her hair. In the book she sells her hair, then her front teeth, which were described as “fine, white teeth”, to a traveling dentist to make into false teeth for some rich person. Unusually fine teeth in fine condition for a peasant woman, and this degradation really adds to the imagery of suffering for her daughter. They didn’t have anesthesia back then you know, and she had been very proud of her fine teeth. You also get more background on her life and see that she makes mistakes that anyone could make, borrowing money for furnishings, wanting nice things so she gets good furniture, then she loses her job(which paid well and she wasn’t really living very far above her means) and can’t make ends meet. Truly heartwrenching.
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True, and I was suprised as well.
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I don’t cry a lot. Rarely in fact. But well-performed Shakespere(reading it doesn’t do it as much for me, luckily there are several Shakespere festivals in my area each year) and Les Miserables(reading/watching/listening) do it to me every time.
I don’t know if anyone reads the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, but in All the Weyrs when AIVAS turns himself off and Robinton decides to go with him… <sniff>
Truman Capote’s short story A Christmas Memory. I cry so hard at the end I can barely see the page. Every time.
A Prayer for Owen Meany – “Oh, God! Please bring him back! I shall keep asking you.”
The children’s book Bridge To Terabithia.
Oh, and one other (sort of guility said): when I read that Farley died in the comic strip For Better Or For Worse. I mean, jeez, who kills off a dog in the funny papers?
