What is the most emotional book you have ever read? The one that made you cry, or really think about a topic?

The one that comes most to mind at the moment in "The Joy Luck Club"(probably because I have just read it),
April Fools Day by Bryce Courtney is also a very emotional book. It is about the death of his youngest son from aids ( he was haemophiliac)and I think I cried through that one. It is a true life story and just shows what an insideous diease aids is, not just physically but mentally and emotionally

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo...good lord, I cried from about page 12 until I finished it. By the way, if you haven't read it, DO!

------------------
If you asked me what I came here to do, I would tell you that I came to live out loud. - Emile Zola

LindaK, you've got one of the definitive downers. Johnny Got His Gun was truly emotion-battering. What's worse is that, even if the book was a fictional account, the situation was real in more cases than anyone wants to think about. It's where the phrase "A basket case" really came from. We glibly say "C'est la guerre", and it is war; war is the greatest obscenity humankind has yet developed, and I speak firsthand.

If you want another, more modern and closer to home most-depressing factual account, read Joseph Wambaugh's "The Onion Field". The account of a police officer who watched his partner murdered and the emotional after-math, including all the baggage he carried around with him from then on, and the effects it had on his own life. Very down.

ooo...I've heard the Onion Field was good. I'll have to pick that up.
Another book that I really loved was My Name is Asher Lev. In fact, I am a huge fan of Chaim Potok and I think all of his books touch me profoundly.

------------------
...enjoying the journey...

Lindak29...Can you give us a description of what the Asher Lev book was about (like the blurbs on the jacket)?

It is the story of a boy who dicovers early in life that he enjoys drawing and painting. It is his passion and his talent. His parents are very strict Jews who do not approve of his talent. They don't like that he draws people, or nudes, or that he wastes his time with art when he should be learning Talmud and Torah. It is a touching story of Asher's relationships with his father and his friend. Reading Chaim Potok's books always bring an inner peace to me as I read them. I am transported to a world where a boy's only duties are to go to school, go to synogogue, and obey his parents. It seems to me a simple world but when Asher's love of art (which, to me, is such a simple, pure joy) disrupts his whole family, it is suddenly made clear that what seems so simple is so very confining. I don't know what else to say. My sister thinks Potok's books are a slow read, but that is part of their enjoyment for me. They were meant to be savored, not devoured. Please try one.

------------------
...enjoying the journey...

last evening I posted a question regarding a series of books by CHRISTIAN JAQUES I do apologise to one and all the auther's name is in fact, CHRISTIAN JACQ.
SORRY DRAGONSAVER
P.S. The 'RAMSES' series consists of 5 volumes being:-
VOLOME1; THE SON OF LIGHT
VOLUME2;THE TEMPLE OF A MOLLION YEARS
VOLUME3;THE BATTLE OF KADESH
VOLUME4;THE LADY OF ABU SIMBEL
VOLUME5; UNDER THEWESTERN ACACIA

There is also a new book, not related to the previous mentioned series called 'THE BLACK PHARAOH' just released in Australia and published by;'SIMON &SCHUSTER UK LTD. I assume the 'RAMSES' series is published by the same company , but ,I could be wrong.

------------------
dragonsaver

it has to be April fool's day by Bryce Courtney
if you have not read it please do
it is a very good book but so sad tho

happy reading

How about "TIM" by COLLEEN McCullough? Probably spelt it wrong
It's been a long time since I last read it

------------------
dragonsaver

A book by Jerzy Kosinski comes to mind. I've read a few of his books but, I think the one that was the saddest was: Being There.

I'm not sure I could tell you the plot, I read it so long ago. I just remember its sadness.

I was required to read a book for a Humanities course I took a couple semesters ago. Having a daughter myself, this book really opened my eyes to the fact that nothing has changed all that much in our education system. Girls are still being programmed to expect less and strive for less than boys. If you have daughters, I HIGHLY recommend you read this book. I've already passed my copy to several friends and relatives who also have daughters.

School Girls: Young Women, Self Esteem & The Confidence Gap
by Peggy Orenstein

p.s. I wouldn't classify this as emotional as much as I would thought provoking.

Books by Danielle Steel usually make me cry. I wonder where she gets her story ideas. Most are always tragic and usually end the way a large numer of women would,in real life,make choices.

I wonder if she writes about personal experiences she or her friends have had. Anybody know for sure?

------------------
Sandalwood's Cosmic Creations: Working with the magic of love....

A couple years ago I read a book that literally made me ache. I think it took me about a day to get through and I was on an emotional rollercoaster. I felt fear, anxiousness, hope, hopelessness and a great sense of loss and heartache. It wasn't by any means the best book I have ever read but I certainly don't remember any other book making me feel all of those emotions so purely. The book is Anna Quinlans' "Black and Blue.

Summer Sisters.....it is an adult novel by Judy Bloom......it made me cry soo much..............

White Oliander by Janet Fitch was a moving story and is also on the Oprah Winfrey Book Club list.
Again...Angela's Ashes and it's sequel 'Tis by Frank McCourt are brilliant.

[This message has been edited by auschic (edited 02-08-2000).]

One of my favorite books, a book for adolescents/young adults, is The Wings of a Falcon by Cynthia Voigt. It is quite emotional and very beautiful.

On another note, 1984 has to be one of the most depressing books I have ever read.

Isis...I agree with you on Summer Sisters. I read it last year and I cried like a baby. I wanted to kill Caitlin (I think that was her name) with that whole Bru episode.

Sandalwood - I am with you regarding Danielle Steele, I am reading Zoya at the moment and have cried buckets.

For emotion swings I like a British author called Derrick Langdon - makes you laugh and cry in the same sentence. He hasn't written many books but they do tend to be based on his family members, not fiction at all.

My favourite of his has to be 'The Cat Who Came in From the Cold'

------------------
From over the pond....

Emotional books? 2 spring to my mind..

About two months ago I read a Doctor Who book involving the third and eighth Doctors, one of the other characters in the book makes a small change in the Doctors timeline by changing the circiumstances of the third doctor's regeneration. So at the end of the book, this character shoots and kills the third doctor and the story ends with the third Doctor's last words being "A tear, Sarah Jane?" Now, other fans of Doctor Who and the Doctor Who books will understand that this is NOT the kind of thing you would expect to happen. The way the part where the Doctor dies is written did make my eyes a little wet... I suppose u kinda have to be a Doctor Who fan to understand that.

Goodbye Mr.Tom , at the end of this book one of the main character's friends is killed by a bomb.

------------------
"There's no point in being grown up if you cant be chilidish sometimes!"-Dr.Who

Mary Barton, By elizabeth Gaskell. A really good book

------------------
If we dont change the world... then who will save it???

Sandalwood.....In answer to your post on whether anyone knew of Danielle Steel's life, while perusing our local "Buck-A-Book" store today, I picked up "The Lives of Danielle Steel, The Unauthorized Biography of America's #1 Best-Selling Author". It was published in 1994 and according to the jacket the authors "relate the surprising and electrifying tale of a fascinating woman who has endured more dark and stormy episodes in her rise to celebrity and fortune than most of her own heroines." Sounds like it should make interesting reading. I had read or seen recently that she had a son that committed suicide, but never got the whole story. Don't know whether it was prior to this book or not. I'll let you kow.

BL

i don't know about springing into an emotion, but "the air ip there" Definately made me really depressed.

------------------
When life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own. -Calvin(Bill Watterson)

The one book that makes me cry, every time I read it, is Wilson Rawls' _Where the Red Fern Grows_. I've read it a thousand times, and it still has the same effect on me. Michael Cunningham's novels do it to me, as well (he just won one of the major awards for... ummmmmm... either _The Hours_ or _A Home at the End of the World_).

That make me think? I try to read stuff that makes me think all the time, and two of the books I'm reading right now are doing it-- Gunter Grass' _Dog Years_ (actually, the whole Danzig Trilogy, which I highly recommend) and E. C. Large's _The Advance of the Fungi_, a fascinating book about the development of plant pathology and the fungicide industry.

There's a third category I feel compelled to include-- books that make me stop reading them temporarily, books that are so intense that I _must_ put them down for a while periodically or go insane. Peter Sotos does it to me almost every time; sections of _Index_ were so intense I literally found myself short of breath after reading. Also, Robert Deveraux's _Deadweight_, to date the farthest out-on-the-bleeding-edge splatterpunk novel I have ever encountered, brutalized me. Closest a book has ever come to giving me nightmares. Third, and last, Joe Lansdale's _Savage Season_, the first of the Hap and Leonard mysteries; the climax of that novel still scares me, and I've read it three times.
(Note that the last two are novels, but Sotos writes nonfiction... the man is an unknown genius.)

R

------------------
http://www.geocities.com/xterminalx

The first book that ever made me cry was Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it two years ago and what a tear-jerker!
The only other book that´s made me cry is News of a Kidnapping...again by Márquez. What can I say, the man is good!