Has reading a book ever made you cry? Which one and why?

A child called it. I wasn’t really crying but I did get really teary eyed. it’s a shame that some kids have to suffer like that.

Ah man… <clears throat> I should have kept a list. I’m sure it would be miles long.

Here’s a few:

- Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The 42 sunsets made me teary-eyed, but the end of the book was what made me break down.)
– The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Holocaust literature has a tendency to make me weepy. I think I only made it a few chapters without crying. I could have zipped through this book in a day or two, but I was too emotionally invested in it to move.)
– The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (“But it wasn’t my choice!” omg, I was dying.)
– Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Two words: Snowden’s Secret. I was gutted.)
– Big Fish by Daniel Wallace (The father-son relationship in this book is beautiful.)
– The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (I was five or six.)
– Night by Elie Wiesel (Another book about the Holocaust, only this was non-fiction and not children’s literature. One scene that stands out is the boy who played the violin in the dark. There’s a lump in my throat just thinking about it.)
– I’m sure Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt made me cry, but I cannot remember a particular scene.

Every book in Salvatore’s Demon Wars series, he kills off my favorite characters in different horrid ways in each book. I also cried my eyes out reading “Night” for english class and also a short story written by one of my friends”

Virtually every book I read makes me cry at some point. I am a softie.

Not that many, considering how many books I read (at least a hundred a year, probably more). I don’t cry often at books or movies, but there have been a few:

The Education of Little Tree: I’ve read it many times, but still can’t make it through the end without crying.
The Bean Trees: There’s a part where a couple who lost their child pose as a little girl’s parents so she can be adopted. I didn’t cry too much, but got a little teary-eyed.
Cyrano DeBergerac: Had to read it in high school, and it might be the first book (well, play) that made me cry.
The Time Traveler’s Wife: I think I only cried because of the little girl. Things with kids get to me sometimes now that I have my own kids.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Yeah, I’m such a dork. I think I cried at the end just from being so invested in the books for so long, and probably from the sleep deprivation brought on by staying up half the night to finish it.

That’s all I can think of right now. There have been a lot of books that have disturbed me very deeply (Holocaust books will do that, as well as books about things that commonly happen to children in some third world countries), but for some reason they don’t actually make me cry.

Six Months to Live (Dawn Rochelle) by Laurlene McDaniel
It makes me cry just thinking about it. The part that gets me the most is the end when the main characters best friend relapses with leukemia, and her parents don’t want to see her in pain and they take her to Mexico for treatment where she passes away.
I know there are more books, but this one touched me.

Children’s literature – The Bridge to Terebithia by Katherine Paterson
Fiction – The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
Non-fiction – First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Fiction- The Perks of Being a Wallfower…. does it to me every time.
Non-Fiction- The Biography of Theodore Roosevelt…. I cried when he dies.

Oddly enough, Old Goriot(Honore De Balzac), The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Death of a Salesman(Arthur Miller) are the first three that pop into my mind. All three end (spoiler alert) with the near-empty funeral of the title character, who has been strongly yet mysteriously characterized throughout the book, and who feels he has been loved throughout it by the people he knows. In the end however, only the narrator character and a few other characters (in the case of Gatsby, an almost completely random one) show up at all. All three books just had amazing catharsis; my emotions welled up like crazy and then overflowed, leaving me with a feeling of peace.

In all three cases the narrator character goes on to declare figurative war against the unforgiving society as the book draws to a close.

On a side note, Goriot and Gatsby have so many parallels it’s almost as though Fitzgerald just rewrote Goriot set in the 20s New York with a couple of different elements. Unfortunately I have yet to find anyone else who has read both, and therefore have no one to share this conspiracy theory with.

Pretty much any book I get emotionally invested in which is a lot of them makes me cry, even if I have read it before.

@muppetish agreed on the violin in the dark, that was wrenching…

I usually don’t cry but I find the ending to “Death of a Salesman” downright tragic. The guy worked hard all his life, and he never made it big. Spoiler In the end, he committed suicide to collect a measly life insurance payout for his family.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest made me cry because I’m a big baby ;)

“Independent People” by Halldor Laxness made me bawl like a baby at the end. If you haven’t read it, you ought to. It’s an amazingly beautiful story.

The Outsiders. I was 12, but I still have similar sympathies.

Gravity’s Rainbow is the only book that’s made me cry, but it wasn’t like weeping or sobbing or anything. It wasn’t even really emotional. It was more like a blank intensity overcame me as I continued reading, and the only physiological response was to cry.

Some books make me really sad but that’s the only one to have made me cry.

The first one I cried in was a Lurlene McDaniel, too, @shego. I was… I think eleven when I read “Someone Dies, Someone Lives”. I was hooked on the One Last Wish books after that. Never really got into the rest of her books though. I outgrew sappy novels quickly.

Strange things bring tears to my eyes when I’m reading.

Gimli explaining the caverns of Helm’s Deep to Legolas in The Two Towers – the sheer emotion he expresses while talking about rocks is truly moving.
The last page of “Around the World in 80 Days”.
The death of Nimue and following execution of Kevin the Bard in “The Mists of Avalon”.
“Angela’s Ashes”... there are tear-stains throughout that book, bigtime.
The poem “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats gets me every time. So does Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”.

Blindness Made me cry (spoiler) at the part where the women resort to prostitution to give their wards food. It was so sad. Epic novel though.

The last 2 chapters of Marley and Me by….what was his name…...John Grogan. Great book.

Many times. Oddly, the only one I can recall at the moment is The Lovely Bones. It was just so fucking sad.

I don’t count it as crying if a couple tears run down my face. I have to really cry. A couple mentioned here so far have made me cry; The Bridge to Terabithia, The Outsiders and the Harry Potter series (in a couple of places).

A Child Called It actually made me vomit. And I was reading it in public, too. That was unpleasant.

Some others I remember making me sob, though I can’t always remember why:
– A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
– God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo
– The Value of X by Poppy Z. Brite (EVERY TIME.)
– Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle (I think; I may misremember.)
– Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
– The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin is one I’ve cried over but not while I was actually reading it…

I’m sure there are more, but this is what I can come up with off the top of my (achy) head.
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Many times but the first that popped into my head was “Time Traveler’s Wife”. I’ve suffered loss and hers in the book were so difficult and devastating.

Most recently? My Sister’s Keeper. Hit close to home, I cried like a baby.

One or two. I almost only read horror novels as far as entertainment reading goes, but a couple of times there were scenes where someone’s dog almost died, or their best friend died or something like that, so that’s a little sad and made me cry while i was reading it.

A few have made me cry. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo made me cry at the end when Quasimodo dies of a broken heart next to Esmeralda’s body.

@augustlan Oh, man. Me too. Bawling like a baby tears. Crazy depressing story, and awesomely beautiful at the same time.

i have no idea why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close made want to cry, but it did, and that was the only book that brought me closest to tears

@Aesthetic_Mess I know exactly why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close made me cry: the grandparents. Man, that book. Especially the letter at the ending (“Here is the point I have been trying to tell you… it’s always necessary. I love you.”)

Thinking about it again, Jacob, I have Loved made me cry. Like a child. I was really connected to the main character because we both have sisters that (unintentionally) overshadow us, and ultimately make us want to go crazy and scream at the top of our lungs and want to throttle something. But in the end, learn that moving away (far, far away) makes you less crazy. :)

I cry all the time when I read books. I get so in touch with the characters that I start to empathize with them and it’s cripling. It’s like having not only my emotions but the charcters as well. Boot Camp by Todd Strasser made me cry because it really upset me that a parent can force their kid to go to a camp that will fix whatever that parent feels is not right about them. Don’t like sports? Oh well I’ll send you to boot camp and fix that. Like what the hell. I’m 17, so the idea that becuase I think differently I can get sent away and brain washed really freaks me out. Theres waaaaaay more books that have made me cry but if I had to explain every single one I’d probably die!

I bawled my eyes out most of the way through Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass.