Blindness by Jose Saramago. Definitely. Just imagine you 're blind and everybody around you is as blind as you are. It tore me apart.
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Blindness by Jose Saramago. Definitely. Just imagine you 're blind and everybody around you is as blind as you are. It tore me apart.
Must be depressing book; I saw the movie and was totally depressed. I really did not care for the film at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by idiosynchrissy
"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers....I believe I read this when I was younger - several of you have mentioned it. I think I liked it very much but it was quite a downer.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini made me really depressed for awhile. If anyone got some bum deals in that book it would be everyone.
"Belle du Seigneur" by Albert Cohen made me cry. And Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair", too. Both are very moving and harrowing love stories by wonderful writers.
crime and punishment...it touches my feelings inaway that kept me from finishing it..what can I do?
AMAZING book.Quote:
Originally Posted by armenian
uh, that's all I really have to say.
It's the sense of waste, of lives blighted, of people needlessly tormented that causes me the gut-wrenching sadness, and it is true that Hardy is one of the best there -- *Tess of the D'Urbevilles* affected me more than *Jude the Obscure* because I wasn't so accustomed to the Hardian strain, but *The Return of the Native* seems even more capriciously and believably cruel in some ways.
*The Good Soldier* is one of my favorites, and this post reminds me that I must read it again. *The House of Mirth* is tragic waste at its worst. Even *Vile Bodies* or *A Handful of Dust* can do that though too.
I cried when younger at *The Last Battle* by C S Lewis and more recently I cried a bit when Dumbledore died, I must admit.
I teared up during my reading of *Atonement*, but have avoided the film so far.
Of all the tragedies one of the most compelling is the Iliad, I get very tearful as the death of Hector approaches (coming all the way), and incandescent at Achilles' treatment of his body. If not, just head on for Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides.
Yes definitely Hardy, Tess or Jude for sure. For me Jude over Tess slightly perhaps because I am beginning to feel just like Jude these days.
Jude is definitely depressing, but the book that made me cry the most buckets was Alistair Mclean's HMS Ulysses. A nightmare!
a tearjerker? try charles dickens' dombey's son. something depressing? joseph conrad's the heart of darkness.
I just finished The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and I did not find it depressing at all. The book that made me most depressed because I did not really get the point of it was The Castle by Franz Kaffka. The Remains of the Day is poignant and I think beautifully and hauntingly sad.
There's a desparately sad play, but plays aren't allowed :(
Agree with The House of Mirth. Not so sure about Sister Carrie.
I'd like to add Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as both sad and depressing
I found A Portrait of a Lady very sad as well as McTeague by Frank Norris. not necessarily tear jerkers but sad none the less.
The Jungle is depressing on so many levels.
Yes Maggie a Girl of the Streets was quite sad. I just recently finnished reading Three Lives by Stein, and all of those stories (there were 3 of them) were all very sad. And for me it felt as if each story became progressively more depressing.
Why not? Three Sisters by Tchekov was probably the saddest play I'd ever seen or read.Quote:
Originally Posted by kelby_lake
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore is chokingly sad, and Christina Stead's Man who loved children is depressing beyond words. Both brilliantly written though.
The Catcher in the Rye always leaves me feeling a little depressed. But for me, in the field of sheer nihilistic, relentless misery, Joseph Heller's Something Happened takes some beating.
"The Jungle" was pretty sad. Such things do happen someplaces in the world, though maybe not in contemporary America.
The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill. I haven't even read it but the synopsis made me almost cry. :bawling:Quote:
Originally Posted by Bitterfly
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt was a pretty big downer.
Er, may I share short story? It made me cry when I first read it when I was a kid and it still made me cry when I read it years after. It's "The Little Mermaid".
The saddest novel I've ever read would have to be "The Dream of The Red Mansions". I cried a lot, I was depressed for around three months because of this unforgettable tragedy. It still haunts me to this very day. Whenever I think of it, it makes me sad.
Oh, and I'd like to add "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo although it has lots of witty lines and humorous scenes.
And also Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". I even cried after watching the movie!
Night ~ Elie Wiesel...fantastic book though...just depressing and sad....
It's another Anderson story that makes me cry: The little Matchstick Girl... and Oscar's Wilde's terribly sentimental "The Nightingale and the Rose": buckets. :bawling:Quote:
Originally Posted by crystalmoonshin
If I may distinguish between sad and depressing.
I still to this day cannot read about Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" without blubbing. Thats sad!( In more ways than one.)
A Thousand Splendid Suns, on the other hand, is just depressing,
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
There is a scene that I cannot describe out loud without crying. A young girl, perhaps 15, lifts up her gown and asks an old man if he would kiss her breasts. She does not want to die without having had a man kiss her breasts.
Does she get stabbing knife pains in her feet when she walks?Quote:
Originally Posted by crystalmoonshin
Yup. Just your description right there made me well up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevets
For me too, that's the saddest book I've read. And especially because she was so young when she wrote it.Quote:
Originally Posted by book_jones
Saddest has to be Patrick McCabe's 'Butcher Boy' while the most depressing is without doubt 'Tess of the Durbevilles'.
The ending of Steinbeck's 'East of Eden' nearly had me in tears, and also i remember a very dark book called 'Scar Culture' by Toni Davidson which i read about ten years ago when i was 15 which really upset me. Think i will re-read it.
The Disney Version ended happily, whereas the Hans Christian Anderson one is sad, and even that is, according to some scholars, a softer version of a more depressing story.Quote:
Originally Posted by kelby_lake
How about 'On the beach' By Neville Shute? A community getting ready for a radiation cloud to hit them, by giving their gardens a last tidy up and buying a suicide pill for each family member.
How about Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
The most recent hopeless and depressing book I read was "Os caminhos a Fome" of Jorge Amado. But it's also a fascinating account of misery and exploitation of some of the poorest people in Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century.
Somehow, I can't find how the novel was translated in English...
Disney were going to do a darker version in the early 50's where she dies.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Doctor Zhivago
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Where the Red Fern Grows
And my personal favorite, Cyrano de Bergerac...good for laughs and cries. You might not like it's overblown, larger-than-life style, but if you do, the ending is absolutely tragic. I still cry when I read the last act.
One of the best German writers of the 19th century was Theodore Fontane and the end to his book Der Stechlin is devastating.
It concerns an old German family who own land in East Prussia and, towards the end of the novel, the Lord of the Manor takes pity on a poor little girl who has an unhappy life with her woodsman father who works on the estate. The old landowner tells her she is welcome to visit him whenever she is unhappy, even though the rest of the family want nothing to do with such a lowly being and do their best to ignore her. The landowner dotes on the child whenever she visits him and they become great friends. Then the old man dies and, as the stone is dropped into place in the family vault where has just been interred, the congregation hear a whimper at the door of the church and turn to see the ragged little urchin standing there and she says in her rough dialect "Now it's finished and I must go away" and she runs crying among the gravestones back to the woods.
I was completely crushed when I read it.
Eugene Onegin, I think.
The old man and the sea. The world should be made out of Santioago's
"The princess who believed in fairy tales"
I bought this book because I thought it was about some kind of character at the medieval times who believed everything was possible... or something like that...
But it ended up being some kind of self-help book o.O I finished reading it with so much effort! Has anyone read it too?? :S