Did a book especially touch a nerve so that you had to literally put it down?

I remember I started to read The Wizard, the Witch and Two Girls from Jersey, but had to put it down because it referenced one of my favorite books and drew the wrong conclusions.

Is that sort of what you’re looking for? (It infuriated me, so I put it down.)

I am looking for intelligent conversation, however, I think she meant (and I too) that sometimes you read something that touches a nerve, strikes a chord, rings true, makes you wonder something, frightens you – cuts too close to home, cuts too close to the bone.

I might have to continue in another language, as I’ve run out of cliches and idioms.

;-)

Often, but generally it is a text or a scholarly article that I need to digest, or that I find myself marveling at. As an example, today I stopped in disbelief and wonderment when I read for a class in sensory perception that in the ½ hour that your eyes need to adjust from full light to nominal darkness, the sensitivity threshold decreases by a factor of 100,000!

Several years ago, my husband was gone for a week. After I put the girls to bed at night, I’d read & watch TV. At the time, I was reading Helter Skelter, the book about Charles Manson. It got so damn freaky that I had to stop reading it at night. That is one weird dude!

The first time that happened to me, I was 12 or 13 and had picked up a copy of Salem’s Lot (my first experience with Stephen King) from the school library. The book was freaky enough, but when I read the part where the young mother punches her infant in the stomach, I was horrified. It disturbed me so much that I couldn’t read further and took the book back to the library. A few years later I did read the whole book, and have read it a couple of times since then.

More recently, I read a book called Sarah’s Key and, two or three times, had to put it down and take a deep breath before I could continue reading. Again, very disturbing scenes from the Holocaust. The book itself wasn’t something I’d rave about, particularly the second half or so, but the descriptions of what people went through were horrific. Other books that had the same effect on me were The Blue Notebook, Skeletons at the Feast, and Sybil..

Lord of the Flies

I read it in high school. It scared me so much I had to put it on the table face down.

The fear of the beast, the loss of rationality, the surreal anxiety. It was claustrophobic and scared the piss out of me.

@jbfletcherfan Oh, I was terrified by that book too! I had forgotten until you mentioned it. (I had once visited the house where Sharon Tate was murdered, just a year or so before the crime.)

I had to read Elizabeth Edward’s tell-all book, “Resilience,” in segments,because several of the terrible events in her life paralleled those in mine.

Well, I started reading The Loved One the day after my grandmother’s burial. It does not tell you what the story is about on the back, but there is a preface or whatever, saying it’s not for the faint of heart. I assumed it was because it was a satire. I read quite a bit and just had to put it down because I felt too raw to continue on with a story like that. I’ll pick it back up when I feel better.

I don’t know about striking close to home or anything, but there have been several books I’ve read that have just been so disturbing that I had to put it down for a little while.

@MissAusten

Stephen King can definitely be disturbing.

One scene that I think of is in Stephen King’s “The Tommyknockers” when he describes how this guy raped his two sons. Way too detailed descriptions of what they were feeling physically and emotionally and it was just…insane…I don’t know where King gets this stuff. (I’m a King fan).

I also know what you mean about Flora Rheta Schreiber’s “Sybil”. That was the most disturbing book I’ve ever read.

I can think of three books that have had this effect on me.

1. Slaughterhouse Five: I was reading it very soon after my Uncle Stu had died. When I got to the part where the guy describes feeding the dog the steak with bits of metal in it, I just started sobbing uncontrollably. It was that one image that let out all the grief i had been holding in for my uncle.

2. The Kitchen God’s Wife: This book is basically a biography that Amy Tan wrote about her own mother. This woman was married to an awful man and there is one scene wherein Amy Tan describes a fight between this man and her mother. Their little girl starts crying and finally the man stops yelling at his wife and goes over to the little girl. Instead of comforting her, he just starts beating her. When I read this, I burst into hysterical sobbing and ran into my mom’s room who had read the book and suggested it to me.

3. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle: The second time I read this book, I couldn’t remember why i liked it so much, only that I liked it a lot. I went along enjoying it, but I didn’t encounter that which had moved me so until the very end. Charlotte sneaks out of her house and goes back to the ship she spent the entire summer on and becomes a sailor with the slave she had previously looked down upon. When I read that part, once again, I burst into tears, but in a good away. :)

@KatawaGrey, lurve for Charlotte Doyle! Ships are awesome. :D

@PerryDolia Me too.

I had no problem reading Flora Rheta Schreiber’s “Sybil,” but I did have some difficulty with “The Diary of Anne Frank” the first time I read it when I was in fifth grade. Although I had already read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and books such as Vrba’s “Escape from Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” the fact that it was the story of a girl like me made it impossible to finish at first.

I also could not finish Stephen King’s “It” or “The Tommyknockers” and, in fact, stopped reading his books entirely for a very long time because the images were so horrid. I recently read “Cell” and “Duma Key,” though. “Cell” was interesting but lightweight, and “Duma Key” was excellent.

And then there are the Gor books which I have been tempted to burn at the stake. Those books and some of Heinlein’s books after “Stranger in a Strange Land” piss me off something fierce.

Heinlein wrote some great stuff (well, I considered it great when I was a kid) but he became increasingly cantankerous, and ended up sounding a lot like a fascist. Too bad.

Heinlein got into this cross-sexual and multiple-wife thing in his later books that was just awful. There were little traces in his earlier books (there was one where someone threatened to spank a young lady and not because she had done anything wrong), but after “Stranger” he got really carried away.

@Zen – Yes, that is what I meant. That’s happened to me a couple of times reading certain books, especially when one of the case studies is something that I’ve done that I’m not proud of or it’s connecting with a thought that “Gee, maybe this mode of thought/behavior isn’t helping me, but I’m too scared to do anything to change it…” and there it pops up on the page, as if my conscience is being pricked. I’ll get unnerved and I’ll want to put the book down.

That happened a lot while I read David Burns’ Feeling Good. Oh, and Nathaniel Braden’s The Art of Living Consciously. Those guys don’t sugarcoat anything. Eeek! Busted!

I have read many a book through a veil of tears. Whether caused by recognition, empathy, or anger, I’ve always been able to continue reading them. The only book I’ve ever put down for a bit was due to grossness (for lack of a better word). It was Gerald’s Game by good old Stephen King. There is a scene where a woman trapped in handcuffs has to remove the entire covering (skin, tissue, etc.) from her hand. It was just <shudders> horrific. I did finish it though.

I was reading “Haunted” by Chuck Pahlaniuk, and I had to stop because it was so disgusting. I did not realize that the cover of our paperback copy of the book was glow-in-the-dark, and when I turned off the lights, I noticed a face screaming in agony. That book had to be shelved, becasue it was even disturbing when I wasn’t reading.

@MissAusten , lurve for Sarah’s Key

Anybody here read A Clockwork Orange, like, before seeing the movie?

Not I, however, I saw the movie at a tender and impressionable age.

Let’s just say, I haven’t whistled “singing in the rain” ever since.

I started reading The Lovely Bones and was up to the point leading toward the murder and I remember thinking to myself “do I really want to read this” and the answer was No. Despite the fact that it was a fiction novel it felt to me like gratuitous voyeurism I am not an especially sensitive reader and have read a lot of books that have disturbed me some way or other but this is the first time I stopped reading for a reason other than bad writing or insufficient interest

@Adagio Oh, but it’s so good! Give it another chance. I did cry, though.

Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods had a bizarre scene of homosexual intercourse describing a man swallowing the seed of a Efreet I believe, I put the book down for a bit trying to figure out if it was there purely for shock value, or if Neil just did it because he felt like it. I never reached a conclusion but did finish the book shortly thereafter.

@pdworkin the part that still stands out in my mind with Helter Skelter is when he says he breathed air into a bird & it flew off. Suuuuuure he did. Wow…you were at the house?

@DominicX Ooohhh, yeah, Stephen King is one weird dude, too. Christine creeped me out good.

Yeah I was, when it belonged to Terry Melcher and his mom, Doris Day.

@pdworkin interesting. Does anyone live there now? Or is it gone?

Oh, I don’t know. This was in 1968. I imagine it’s still there; nice house in an exclusive area.

Google maps thinks it’s still there. Check this out. And this. Apparently it is a tourist attraction of some sort. Blecchhh!

That’d be interesting.

Yeah I started to read Chronicles of Narnia and all the Christianity of it was so overbearing that I put it down and never finished it

There are two stories by John Varley that when I read them, when I get to the end, I just say “Wow!” and don’t read anything else for at least two days.

Those stories are Persistence of Vision and Press Enter Both are graphic and creepy in a very unique way. Press Enter will make you seriously consider killing your computer forever.

I have to admit I had to put Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows down after… well… you know… the… thing… not sure who hasn’t read it yet but don’t want to give it away :P and cried for a while and then I thought I better finish it so I picked it back up and started reading the next page and was just like oh, oops!

I don’t recall any other books making me have to put them down, I’ve cried in many and they’ve touched a nerve or struck a chord or whatever but that just makes me keep reading until the end and then I can have my big cry.

@shrubbery Lurve for not being a spoiler!

@shrubbery and @augustlan lurve is right!

Do paper cuts count? Kotlers Marketing Management cut me real bad once…

@Cartman No, they do not count. And no name dropping.

When I was in high school and we were instructed to read Dante’s Inferno, I flat out refused once I reached the part where he started describing how different sins were treated in the parts of hell.

I told my teacher that I wanted a different assignment.

Even at that age, the religious upbringing I endured had painted a grim picture – one that only told you what NOT to do, and evil this, and the devil that.

I successfully extracted myself from that church at age 13. At age 16, being faced with this brilliant but shocking novel, I DID NOT want to revisit something that so strongly reminded me of the teachings of that church.

I did read A Clockwork Orange and I did see the movie. Brilliant. To this day, I still vividly recall parts of both in writing and visually that cause me to feel ill.

Particularly, the part with the eyelids. I can never ever remove that scene from my memory.