There's something ineffably sad about My Ántonia. Aside from the fact that Jim and Ántonia don't end up together, which is pretty obvious from beginning. There's just something in the book's undercurrent, something beneath its surface.
There's something ineffably sad about My Ántonia. Aside from the fact that Jim and Ántonia don't end up together, which is pretty obvious from beginning. There's just something in the book's undercurrent, something beneath its surface.
La felicidad es interior,
no exterior; por lo tanto,
no depende de lo que tenemos,
sino de lo que somos.
- Pablo Neruda
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The other two novellas that came with Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller - Henry James
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
Here's a few:
Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
Maya - Jostein Gaardner
Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut
A Happy Death - Camus
The works of Virginia Woolf. There's a certain brittleness inherent in the works of Virginia Woolf that calls for a little caution as if she's at the point of breaking into little pieces of glass. Her short fictions included.
Last edited by bookowskee; 07-21-2013 at 04:57 AM. Reason: removed a short fiction entry
1984, Wuthering Heights, Tess of D'Urbervilles and Atonement are really depressing, but I don't remember crying. I was just disappointed and depressed. Time-Traveler's Wife and A Thousand Splendid Suns were really sad too. Hans Christian Andersen's stories like The Little Match Girl and The Little Mermaid are real tear-jerkers.
The one book which has made me cry the most for the past couple of years was Mockingjay, the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy. It's really sad, so much death and destruction.
I cry very easily when I read or watch movies, but I don't think that simply shedding a few tears makes a book particularly sad and/or depressing. For example, I cry every time I read Jane Eyre, but I still don't think it's all that depressing, because the ending is happy enough. It's more to do with the ending and the overall feeling. I don't mind crying a lot in the middle if there's at least a little bit of happiness at the end, but I don't like thoroughly miserable stories with no hope at all.
Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes.
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
I love Vonnegut, the wandering nature of his works gets to you, but they tie in together at the end of his works typically.Originally Posted by bookowskee
Yeah, me too. Just finished reading his bio, So It Goes and Kurt Vonnegut The Last Interview. You might want to check those if you still haven't.
Vonnegut's Mother Night, might qualify in this thread as well. Deciding to hang yourself in the end is, could be, depressing enough.
1. Diary of A Young Girl, by Anne Frank. This is mostly because I'm in love with Anne Frank, and I felt that if she was alive now I would be in love with her. I was about fourteen when I read it, so her age.
2. The Catcher in the Rye. My teacher made me read this book freshman year of high school. I contemplated suicide the entire time we studied it in class, which was about three weeks in length. I thought I was insane.
Tess. Always Tess.
I'm weary with right-angles, abbreviated daylight,
Waiting for a winter to be done.
Why do I still see you in every mirrored window,
In all that I could never overcome?
I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair last week. THAT was depressing. Despite the huge 180 near the end of the book, and the weak characters overall, I was thoroughly engaged and really felt for the main character of the story. Some of my feelings may have to do from also having worked hard manual labor, many times in dangerous or harsh conditions, though not to the extremes as presented in this book. I would heartily recommend the book even though it's a real downer.
Islands in the Stream by Hemingway. The death of the main character's children is not even the saddest part of the book.
Read the original short story, written in diary form: it was indeed a tearjerker.
No American troops were harmed during the Watergate cover-up.
Jude the Obscure. My God, that was BLEAK!
I'm with you...'The House Of Mirth' & 'Sister Carrie' were very sad books (they are also two of my favorites.) 'American Pastoral' & 'Revolutionary Road' weren't a bundle of laughs either.
Agreed, "Revolutionary Road" was quite sad. Had read that one right after reading John Barth's "The End of the Road." Gotta love abortions eh. Another good sad one is Joseph Heller's "Something Happened"...where abortion seems like it would have been preferable. It was Heller's second novel and was published 13 years after "Catch-22", a work I read two chapters of before putting down, finding it overpromoted, similar to "A Confederacy of Dunces", which I finished for some reason, though I felt like killing myself afterwards.
Agreed. Jude the Obscure is also incredibly bleak. Oddly, though, I don't find Hardy depressing. Maybe it's because, though he did have a bleak view of existence he was himself relatively cheerful. Other writers, like Conrad and Larkin, who suffered from depression, really get me down. It's as if the depression seeps into their work.
Dickens is a fairly cheerful writer, but there are desperately sad moments in his novels. When Joe the roadsweeper cleans up the grave of his friend, because it's all he can do for him, it really gets to me. Even thinking about that scene brings tears to my eyes. Then there is A Christmas Carol. Yes, it's sentimental, and yes Tiny Tim is nauseating, but I cannot get through any version of this, not even the Muppet one, without crying like a baby. I also find Pip's treatment of Joe in Great Expectations unbearable.
The Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St Aubyn are very sad.
There is a poem by Blake, called The Chimney Sweep' which I can't read without crying. I have no idea why. It is literally the only poem to have that effect on me. The line "wash in a river and shine in the sun" gets me every time.
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