Book readers, which fictional story while reading it made you feel life is still worth living despite the desperate struggles?

Neither a book, nor fictional, but seeing kids playing with their toy aeroplanes makes me smile.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Such panache!

The Plague by Camus.

The Harry Potter books lifted me at a hard time in my life.

@ragingloli That’s one serious case of Big Boys Toys!

My own.
As I work through pages and rewrites, I convince myself I want to stick around long enough to see my babies face the world.

Players handbooks for dungeons and dragons. I see the world differently. A course in miracles. A guide to inner peace. Emotional intelligence helped too.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, most recently.

The Glass Castle. It’s a memoir about a family that grew up in poverty and moved around as nomads because the writer’s parents were dysfunctional. They lived for a time in WV in a house without electricity or water. Jeanette Walls grew up to be a journalist for MSNBC. At one point, after she had made a career for herself, she was in a taxi going to an awards show and spotted her parents dumpster diving. I read it years ago, but still think about it from time to time.

Never read it ^ though I have heard of it. Gonna now.

The Odyssey.

Going to get that book @chyna…

The Earth Children’s series by Jean Auel.

^^^^^^ The first book was very, very good. It was a delightful experiment in educated guesses about “how did the cave men discovered….” She did her research.
Subsequent novels were readable, but somewhere she got the idea that it was the porn and the dysfunctional relationship between Ayla and Jondalar that was the most interesting, SMH. Stephen King even commented on it. He called them “Ms. Auel’s randy cave people.” :D :D :D.

Oh….“Sacajawea” is a great one. If that woman, a single mom, can do everything she did while trekking across the country, I have nothing to complain about.

^I agree that the series got a bit Peyton Place and yeah, she got a bit bogged down in the sex. I sometimes wonder if authors take their personal lives into books and she was having (or fantasizing about) a lot of sex at the time she was writing. Stephen King wrote a number of stories where a child died and…yep…there it is…a friend he had as a child was hit by a train and died. But the Earth’s Children series dealt with survival and learning, growth and overcoming societal biases. A lot of things that I think still apply today. And the main character is totally honest, never having learned to lie, and is a person of character who stands by her beliefs despite the potential consequences. More traits I think we need more of in this world.

I have a feeling someone suggested it to her. Sex sells and all of that. I just know that my young teenaged girls and I hat an absolute blast with some of the more ridiculous adjectives she used to describe the genitalia. We laughed until we cried!

Yes, it probably would have been a bit tacky to say “He was hung like a bison!”

No..it was “his weapon of luuuuvvvvv!”
And Ayla’s furry mound…..
ridiculous and hilarious.

I actually had a mental picture of Ayla’s “furry mound”. In reality it would have started about her stomach and been furry all the way down her legs. Not appealing to me, but maybe in those days it would have been a turn on. I dunno.

No, she was referring to the mons pubis, @seawulf575. She wasn’t suggesting that she was hairy starting at her belly and running down her legs, like some sort of monkey. She was a modern human female.

I understand what she was referring to. But even today, there are certain women that never shave, never groom. They are pretty hairy. And Ayla certainly never shaved, at least not as described in the books. It’s a good bet she had hairy legs that went clear through her mons pubis area and up onto her belly.

I loved that series, but I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who didn’t feel a need to be constantly in Ayla’s bed.

Wait..you think that if we don’t shave we’ll have pubic hair all over our bellies and running down our legs?!?

@Patty_Melt right? As far as I’m concerned it was overdone and distracting. I was far more interested in her unique ways of coming up with solutions. I guess someone pushed her into going over board on the sex thing.

time to stop following.

Anything by Rumer Godden, especially In This House of Brede.

Hope this can get going again after such a derail.

Little House on the Prairie. I read it as a kid, and again as an adult. As an adult, though, I sympathized with Caroline more than Laura.
Of course, Laura doesn’t touch much on how her mom felt about moving ALL the time, losing crops, almost dying in the winters, floods, fires, locusts….but I can imagine.