With their vast scope and the unparalleled ability to bore into someone’s head, novels have perhaps the greatest potential for affecting us emotionally. As much as I love movies and television, novels have the ability to move me the most.
So which novel most affected you? And what was the part that did it?
As a kid I remember being deeply affected by classics like Johnny Tremain, The Bridge to Terebithia, My Brother Sam is Dead and Where the Red Fern Grows.
As an adult, well, I’m not actually much of a crier, but I was pretty moved by The Sky is Everywhere, The Secret Year, Atonement and, of course, The Book Thief.
What about you?
Art: Never Morning Wore To Evening But Some Heart Did Break by Walter Langley
A Thousand Splendid Suns and Beloved.
Black Beauty. Little Women. The Deep End of the Ocean.
Basically, put in a dying pet, loved one, or a lost or dead child, and you had better not get between me and the Kleenex.
The Fault in Our Stars (obviously) by John Green, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
@ Jenna – I forgot about the Little Prince. Me, too.
@ Jennifer – how could I forget Charlottes Web!!! Charlotte, no! So sad. 🙁
John Green can definitely make me cry.
The only books that ever made me cry were The Bridges of Madison County (duh) and Of Mice and Men
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kinsolver. You knew right from the beginning that one of the four children would not be making it out of the Congo alive, and the tension built throughout the novel. But when death came, it was completely unexpected and shockingly swift. Best of all, the scene was told from a child's point of view. A masterpiece! I was distraught for days afterwards.
The Green Mile by Stephen King. I learnt that you can't sob and read at the same time, not matter how much you want to keep reading.
The Green Mile by Stephen King. I learnt that you can't sob and read at the same time, not matter how much you want to keep reading.
I have never cried so much at a book as when I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Towards the end, don't want to give it away. I read it in middle school and was deeply affected by the relationship the girl had with her father. I'll never forget it. Still one of my favorite books.
Tolkien's "Children of Hurin".
Also the first draft of my friend's novel which I just finished reading because ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Never speaking to her again.
When I was little, I read a book called "A Dog Called Kitty" that left me sobbing…because it was one of the most emotionally manipulative kids' books ever.
The kid narrator was bitten by a rabid dog as a toddler, so he's terrified of dogs. A dog finally befriends him, and the kid names him Kitty. Kitty saves him from stuff, the kid learns to like dogs, yadda yadda yadda, the end, right?
Nope. In the last chapter, for no apparent reason, the whole family goes to the city to visit the boy's uncle who works on a construction site. Someone yells, "Look out!" and a huge pipe falls out of nowhere and crushes the dog to death. The End.
Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
Exodus by Leon Uris
I have been most affected by scenes in novels dealing with the Holocaust. Though fictional, they represent real horrors perpetrated on real people. The scene in The Odessa Files where an old man had to help load his own wife onto a gassing truck haunts me to this day.
~jon
A Dog Called Kitty
Flowers for Algernon
The Time Traveler's Wife
some of James Herriot's stories
Anne Frank, the diary of a young girl.
Not a novel per se, but a memoir with novelistic (read: fantastical) elements: The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe (Dutton, 1929). In the early 1990s I was on a lunch break, reading the end while sitting on a plush couch in a hotel lobby — and I was sobbing.
As a kid: Where the Red Fern Grows and The Diary of Anne Frank.
As an adult: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I think because I'd been invested in the series SO LONG–I started crying at Dudley telling Harry he wasn't a waste of space and never quit), The God of Small Things, Prince of Tides, The Kite Runner, Les Miserables.
The Fault in Our Stars had me crying, especially at the end.
The Red Pony,Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz were the first books I remember reading that made me cry.I was seven years old at the time.
As an adult the books that have affected me the most have been Fifty Shades of Grey.The third book made me cry the most but each book has made me cry.Several of J.D Robb's In Death series have made me cry.I love to read and I also write Romance Suspense novels.The Hobbit made me cry all the way through the novel.I was pregnant with my third child at the time and my husband read a chapter to me every night because it calmed the baby down as though she was listening to the story.Eventually all three of us were relaxed enough to go to sleep.
Never cried much over books or movies as a kid, but sniffled when Old Yeller had to be shot. Beth's death didn't affect me, and to my mother's horror, I didn't cry when Uncle Tom died. What she didn't know was that I sobbed over the scene with his wife. Her quiet noble grief haunts me to this day. As an adult, I was distraught for a week after "watching" Anna Karenina plunge into a nightmare from which there was only one way out. And I really hated losing one Weasley twin — that sucked.
See You at Harry's by Jo Knowles-I cried for the entire second half of the book
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
All three brought on the ugly cry, but oh what a good catharsis each one is. Honorable mention to Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere. I didn't cry, but I love that book with all of my heart.
I wisely avoided books with animals growing up, as I was forced to read Where the Red Fern Grows, (I didn't start out as an avid reader,) and spotted the trend. I sobbed buckets after finishing it and had no desire to do so again.
That said, the first time I cried as an adult, (now an avid reader, but I stick with lighter material,) was when I got to the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. As a mom, reading Harry's emotion when Molly Weasley hugs him and Rowling writes: "He had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother," just made my heart break.
Yup, teary now just thinking about it.
Walter Macken's Seek the Fair Land made me cry like a baby. John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was also a tear jerker. And Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Devastating in all the right ways.
Bridges of Madison County is the only book that made me cry.
I'm usually not an emotional person. I rarely cry, not for movies, books, or sappy commercials.
"Eyes of Prey" still gets me and I haven't read it in a couple years. I'm still sad about Cassie and that fact that the Chief could have saved her life.
"Softly Say Goodbye" by KC Sprayberry.
Fantastic YA novel about the perils of teen drinking.
The Book Thief, yes!
And the Amber Spyglass.
I BAWLED over the bench scene and when they have to leave each other.
One time I was working at a bookstore and found a copy of it out of place. I opened it up to that part and just started crying and reading it.
Someone came over and asked me if I was ok.
"Yeah," I said, "It's just so sad. They want to be together but they can't."
In a perfect world, the person would have said, "WOW! What a good book…I'll buy it."
But the person just looked at me like I was a weirdo, and walked away.
The novel that made me cry the most? 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Who would have thought that a Stephen King novel would have a heart-wrenching love story?
King credits his son–novelist Joe Hill–with suggesting the ending.
Jane Eyre, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and The Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society all left me wet-eyed with a lump in my throat. But 11/22/63 made me cry the most.
To this day, it's still 'Love you Forever' by Robert Munsch. Fifteen years since i first heard it, and I still can't make it all the way through without becoming totally useless.
The Red Pony by Steinbeck. The part that made me cry and haunts me still (spoiler if I tell, but–it's what happens to the pony.)
I have to agree with you about Atonement. Sweet divine, I was a blubbering mess when I read that book.
My Sister's Keeper, The Notebook, and Not Without My Sister had me crying myself to sleep. Anything Nicholas Sparks does tend to get me every time.
I remember reading the Giver in one night and being incredibly affected.
There were many books that I read with similar experiences, but as a young girl I wasn't able to keep track of the titles.
That has always been one of my faults which I wish I could change. I really wish I could remember the books I read when I was young so that I could recommend or re-read them.
The Remains of the Day: I have never cared about a character more than the repressed, cruel, obtuse, discriminating, loyal and ultimately noble butler Stevens, or the woman he belonged with, the feisty, tender housekeeper Miss Kenton. An ecstasy of agony!