Books That'll Have You Weeping Like Harry When Sirius Died
1. Eleanor and Park! It makes me cry every time I read it. I don’t want to give spoilers, but it’s like falling in love for the first time and losing that first love all over again. So many feels!
2. It’s a story about a grumpy old man who has to deal with a loud boisterous family that moves in next door, when all he wants is to be left alone. It’s both hilarious and gut wrenching.
3. I don’t really have to explain this one. I’m not sure how anyone can make it through this one without snotting up a whole box of tissues.
4. This book made me cry pretty much from beginning to end. The story is told from the point of view of a dog and starts on his last day of living as he recounts his whole life. It is a story about love, loss, family, and a man fighting for his daughter. Incredibly emotional and very well written.
5. A Fine Balance will rock your world — in ways both awful and awesome. Rohinton Mistry uses the entangled lives of four strangers — a stubborn widow, a naive young student, and two determined laborers fleeing chaos — to tell a larger story of squalor, struggle, and the human spirit in India’s slums. The prose is so rich and the panorama of life so riveting and raw, I couldn’t get this book out of my head — or heart.
6. Can I swear here? Because f*ckkkk, this book destroyed me. It’s one of the most brutal and surreal things I’ve ever read — and it actually happened. Sonali Deraniyagala was the lone survivor from her family in the wake of the 2004 tsunami that struck Sri Lanka. She lost everything and everyone, and her raw descriptions of her pain and perseverance will stay with me forever.
7. Set in Nazi Germany during the second world war, this is a story about a young girl, her love for words, a lemon-haired boy, a Jew in hiding, a new mother, and an accordion-playing man. A heart-wrenching tale of love, loss, and curiosity — terribly tragic and perfectly heartbreaking.
8. There’s a passage in which a son murders his own father over a piece of bread. The Nazis were so amused by this that they just started throwing bread in the cars to incite more violence.
9. Stephen Chbosky takes both the most unsettling and comforting parts of adolescence and makes something that resonates through adulthood. Charlie’s voice fits the wallflower experience perfectly from wanting to just fade away to trying to prove yourself — to yourself. This novel proves that YA is great because, no matter what age, the juxtaposition of happiness and sadness depicted is something everyone will (or has to) experience.
10. Without a doubt, A Thousand Splendid Suns is the most heart-wrenching book I’ve ever read. Khaled Hosseini managed to churn the very depths of my soul in this riveting book. His uncanny ability to make the reader feel what his protagonist Mariam Jo feels made me want to reach out and save her, because I was drowning in her sorrow too. Absolutely bewitching.
11. If you haven’t read anything by Isabel Allende yet, this is the perfect place to start. It’s the family saga to end all family sagas, spanning four generations and two revolutions, filled with more dark secrets, betrayal, forbidden love, fortune-telling, colorful characters, anachronistic turns, and actual spirits than you could ask for. I fell so hard for some of these characters, it was almost physically painful to let them go.
12. This is a beautiful book detailing a young boy’s struggles with his mother’s cancer and how this manifests in a dark monster that visits him each night. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and the story itself is amazing.
13. It’s about a writer who finds the diary of a young Japanese girl and slowly becomes entangled in her life. Ozeki so beautifully illustrates the grace of human relationships, and how a connection can be form between two people who never met, will never meet, but exist in each other’s lives through the tenuous threads of time. A lovely and intoxicating read.
14. Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded, and the world seemed colder. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you, receive wisdom for your busy life today the way you once did when you were younger?Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live.Tuesdays with Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world.It’s been ten years since Mitch Albom first shared the wisdom of Morrie Schwartz with the world. Now Mitch Albom reflects again on the meaning of Morrie’s life lessons and the gentle, irrevocable impact of their Tuesday sessions all those years ago. . .
