Books that reduce you to tears

i cried at dumbledore's funeral, but that was years ago. and i went through that whole he's not dead he's not dead! thing before jk rowling confirmed that he was in fact dead

I have been moved by several books, but as of yet, I have never cried.

Zame.

Wilson Rawls' Where the Read Fern Grows

Oh, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling

I cried during parts of Pygmy, which is another way of saying "most any book can make me cry".

It didn't make me want to cry, but a rape/torture/murder scene from Dennis Cooper's, Frisk, recently made me want to rip the book into shreds and set it on fire in the yard to cleanse my home of the evil I had accidentally brought inside. Thankfully, the scene turned out to be a fantasy sequence of a sort and not actually happening. (Which seems ridiculous now that I type it out, because nothing in any book is "actually happening.") Jesus, I thought American Psycho was graphic...

The ONLY book that has made me cry was The Road. And it wasn't just a little tear, it was full-out WEEPING.

Now I watched the movie Blindness before I read the book and the movie made me cry after the rape scene, when the women were cleaning the body of the one woman, but the when I read the book, that part didn't make me cry. Hmmm....

Definitely sounds like my kind of book! Not because of the rape scene, but because I would be amazed to read anything more graphic than [I]American Psycho[/I]!

Werther - Goethe
Bright Lights, Big City - McInerney
and even Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

There are others titles who made me cry, but these are what I remember in this moment.

The Power Of One and Tandia by Bryce Courtenay

The only time that's ever happened to me is when I read that part in Gone, Baby, Gone when he found that dead kid in the bathtub.

The Green Mile. Every fucking time I read it.

Nothing else comes to mind, though.

Same here,I was a kid though. Also,Sounder by William H. Armstrong made me cry when I was younger,like 12 or 13. Nothing in my adulthood has made me cry cause' I'm hard like that! The Road has come close though,too dang close.

I cried when Sirius died in The Order of the Phoenix, I was 10.
I also cried at the end of Burned by Ellen Hopkins, it was a really moving story.

There si this book called Choke Chain by Jason Donald, its a debut novel about two kids growing up in South Africa with an abusive Dad, and towards the end I cried. Thankfully I read it on my day off otherwise I would have bawled in the shop with all those kids staring at me. You know losing street cred and all that shit.

Those pikeys wouldn't understand that strange, ink-stained block of papers in your hand anyway. You could just tell them you were crying because you just killed Chuck Norris.

I'm not going to list any books from my childhood because the list is really long. I was a weepy kid.  Old Yeller, for sure, and the first Great Brain book.

More recently:

The Road by Cormac MCarthy 

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

1000 Acres by Jane Smiley

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Oh, and a short story from the Shotgun Intensive had me bawling on the subway.

I think What is the What and Gargoyle have come closest to making me cry.

Awesome..^^ Gargoyle.

I forgot two that always make me cry by John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany and Until I find You

I remember seeing that movie and I have never heard an audience all gasp in unison like that when he stomps that mouse. Whatta reaction!!

Which, I think, is a huge credit to Michael Jeter's acting. I mean, you know a mouse stomp is gonna get at least half the audience, but you just get so attached to Jeter, his emotional reaction seals it.

I give it them both really. with out the one being so sympathetic and the other being so rotten, it wouldn't have been that hard hitting.
Percy Whetmore, what a great fuckin villain!

Point well taken! Great cast, great script. Ah, writing, the last thing on a studio exec's mind, the first thing in an audience's heart...whether they know it or not.

Lots of Onions by Meatthinker

A comic that got me choked up was a graphic novel called Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales. It wasn't the rape scene or the Elongated man's being a widower or maybe it was all those things but it felt like an end of innocence era for the heroes. It felt like the days of Superman fighting aliens who wanted world domination,and Batman stopping the Riddler from stealing diamonds from Gotham's mint or whatever were over. Things were about to dirtier and we might see Superman stopping child pornographers,heroin dealers,martyred terrorists. Which as times change the changes in the writing would be inevitable. It just made me sad to think the days of Batman chasing a masked burgler,with a burlap sack with a dollarsighn painted on it,were over. It felt like the age of innocence was over. Kind of sad.

The Road by Cormac MCarthy shook me to the core. My son (first kid) was just a month old when I read it, so I was already at the emotional precipice...

@Caligula7 - I love it when books effect me like that. Have you ever read Peter Sotos? If not, don't.

@littlemissmcrapey - Blindness was a tough read, but I see where you are coming from. The grim determination on Julianne Moore's face was hard to bear.

@KenoSsa - Have you heard Jeremy Irons read Lolita? He's the perfect voice. Pure genius.

I'm new here and I just dove in. If I broke a rule or otherwise missed something, let me know. I won't make the same mistake twice.

Best to all.

The only rules are there are no rules. and also don't talk about fight club.

Thank fuck I have no intrest in Harry Potter or this thread would have runed the series for me.

This.

In chronological order!
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. There's this moment with Human in there that just never leaves me. I can see it now as clearly as the first time i read it.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I wept during that book. Like, honest to god bawled for pages and pages.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy made me shed one single tear. I thought i'd make it through, but it got me with, like, three pages left, or something.
The Giving Tree almost made me cry a few weeks ago when i reread it for the first time in howevermany years. And, yeah, there are tons of books that've almost got me, just blindsided me with emotion. There's even this poem out there somewhere in the world that i read at the exact right moment in time that nearly killed me. Can't remember who wrote it or what it was, but it was perfect in every way that words can be perfect. It was only, like, ten lines, too.

A Prayer for Owen Meany got me way back when I was 18.

What is the What dragged me way down, but no tears.

My current writing project nearly reduces me to tears almost daily, but that's because I can't fucking finish writing it...

I obviously need to read The Road; seems like a weepy favourite!

Speaking of, I haven't read the book yet, but John Coffey's execution is the closest a film has brought me to tears. And the mouse being stomped, of course, ranks among the most shocking moments of my life.

it's a favorite here overall. some people may have differing opinion about McCarthy but for that book, it's almost a unanimous favorite. i just finished reading it and liked it. try reading it with no distractions around and maybe listen to ominous music.

like the jaws theme in a loop, but you know, quieter.

Ditto.

No weeping snot and tear moments, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close definitely had me choked up on so many occasions.

I cant cry, but "the lie" actually choked me up a little

She's like a young Amy Hempel.

The story follows a man who is trying to get to know his kids, trying too late to be a father to his two daughters, the younger of which is a promiscuous youth and the older of which is in rehab. His wife is in a coma and he finds out from his older daughter, who he hasn't seen in years, that his wife had been cheating on him. This dude struggles through all of that while being of ancient Hawaiian lineage and trying to decide between pleasing his family by selling his sacred land to New Yorkers and pleasing his ancestors by keeping it.

He's a shitty father and a shitty husband and it's just heartbreaking watching him try to undo years of neglect, but he works his ass off trying to turn it all around while on a trip to meet the man his wife loved. The scenes with his younger daughter telling stories to the comatose wife are staggering and comical. Pretty much everything the younger daughter does is comical, and the novel is upbeat enough to keep from being too sad and gloomy even when it's revealed that the wife's will demands the plug be pulled.

There's also a typical Hawaiian meathead boyfriend who provides some comic relief, being one extra thing the father would rather not deal with, and this surfer dude has a pretty shining moment near the end where he takes a punch to the head and not only doesn't hit back, but everybody but the father realizes that the punch does nothing to him, and yet he winces and rolls over for the man that hit him (the wife's father), and through this he earns the wife's husbands respect, though neither can explain why the guy just let the punch happen.

It's slightly similar to Jacob's Room, how the whole story revolves around a woman we only know through other people's observations and points of view.

The bonus is that anything you read from Kaui Hart Hemmings, you feel like you were born and raised and lived all of your life in Hawaii.

Also great (short stories):

Oh, and:

It was literally the last two or three pages that did me in.

gah. 'wasteland' by francesca lia block. saddest book i've ever read, the ending was pretty heartbreaking.

Yeah - up until that point I was thinking, "Why does everybody say this book is so sad?"