What's the all-time saddest book you've ever read?

Nah, I only read Despereaux, but I might give the other one a look; glad to have stirred up a memory or two

I've gotta say A Hungry Man Dreams.
It's not a conventional tragedy-it's just some guy who does stuff. He preaches at a church, moves around. It invites a sense of pastoral comfiness near the end, but it's got the "feeling" of "accepting your death when the time is right". I guess the message is to enjoy your life while you have it, but it really hit me hard.

mickey.. easy on the pills

When I was little my grandma taught me to read Russian before I went to preschool, and I didn't know any English at all at the time. I remember reading quite a few fucked up stories, including:

-The Russian Translation of The Little Mermaid, the version where she kills herself
-The Silly Little Mouse, a story about a mouse whose mom sings him to sleep, but he doesn't like how she sings and demands she find someone else to sing to him. She finds a bunch of different animals who all sing to the mouse but the mouse hates all their voices, until Mama Mouse brings a cat home. The little mouse goes right to sleep from the singing but when his mom comes in to check on him, he is gone.
-The Kolobok (dough ball, I guess?), about this ball of dough that gains sentience and escapes from this old couples' house and has adventures. He ends up being eaten by a wolf after the wolf tricks him.

Also, I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells when I was ~8 years old and I remember actually crying when the time traveler couldn't find Weena and realized she probably died in the fire.

Also I will never forgive my fucking friend who lent me Marley & Me when I was 10 because that book had me crying like a bitch.

MODS PLEASE

Throughout my childhood and adolescence my family and I used to go on a coach trip about once a year with more or less the same large group. I never saw most of these people elsewhere so they were forever remarking on how much I had changed and things like that, and it always put me in a nostalgic and melancholic mood for the long journey home. During one of these trips, when I was 15 I think, I was reading Our Town for school and the third act just cut through me like a knife. I was distraught, it was like my childhood died on that coach journey.

Most of my classmates didn’t bother reading it and the rest didn’t feel much for it, which upset me in a different way.

dunno lol readings for nerds

Notes from the Underground

Pan by Knut Hamsun made me sad... the dog part anyway. I can't bring myself to read about his dog anymore, I have to skip it.

Zinky Boys
i cried almost every page

You'd like MGS 5

"Mio nonno era un ciliegio"
Some random italian book i had to read in primary school, cried my eyes out like a little pussy

Whats the ultimate robot book guys?
Notes for underground was a little normie to me.

The definition of "robot" varies a lot since people at /r9k/ can be self-centered manchildren who think their life couldn't be any worse and say everyone different from them is a normie. What exactly are you looking for? What type of character or story?

What ever happened to Ciara?

I honestly want more of the kind of Notes for Underground.
No idea about Ciara.

DIARY

DESU

What am i a fucking nerd? I don't read books i listen to what people say about books.

Of Human Bondage
Stoner
Of Mice and Man-tears
The Brothers Karamazov
Virginia Woolf in general

Your diary, desu.

Some nice stories here in this thread

I always reread White Nights by Dostoyevsky, I've reread it at least 4 times. It such a beautiful and sad short story.

Oscar Wilde: The happy prince and other tales: Couldn't keep from cryin'

Iliad: the death of Hector
Dom Quijote: the end of the dream and the death of the protagonist
Crime e Punishment: the whole book eas so sad. I remember when Raskolnikov asks Sonia to read the part where Lazarus is ressurected - one of the most powerful moments in the novel. There are aso really grotesque moments in the narrative -I forgot the name of that woman who goes insane and takes her children to the streets to perform.
The King in Yellow: the story of a girl who died in love with a strange.I don't think many people remember that one, the stranger is lost and he meets this young woman who raises falcons for hunting.

Probably this. Although I shed a single tear at while reading White Nights, I think Notes left a deeper impression on me.

Am I edgy for thinking it was comedic?

That was by far my favorite story in the King in Yellow as well. That was the 4th (of 12?) story, and after it it went down hill, if I recall my impressions correctly

>That was by far my favorite story in the King in Yellow as well.

I also enjoyed the first three, but they are so different, it feels as of they were part of a different book.

>That was the 4th (of 12?) story, and after it it went down hill, if I recall my impressions correctly

I think it had less than 12, but I am almost sure it was the fourth. The first was the reputation guy; second: art gallery; third: yellow sign. After the three stories, there are some short poems(?)[I killed the man I love/ if fairness is beauty etc.], and then this story. Do you remember the story of a boy who steals - or receive it from her- the rose from a girl? The boy is new in town and falls in love with the ideallized girl.
This was also an enjoyable story. There some about a war that I can't remember anything other than the fact they were about war.
Btw, I read everything written by Lovecraft before KiY and, for me, the first stories were better than everything written by Lovecraft.

is this some allegory to the holocaust?

There is a good adaptation of White Nights, I think it is Itallian.
The whole book reads like one of those beautiful dreams that you don't want it to end until it eventually does when her liver returns and the Dreamer starts to live his state before he first met her.

>he was spending his youth reading the classics

Why couldn't I have done this

You can read Metamorphosis in two hours

Naked Lunch

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

> the death of Hector
My nigga. That shit got to me when I had to read it in high school.

The Lorax

Check out No Longer Human
It gets a bit edgy but it's a cycle of a guy incapable of showing his "real self" and only skating through life via facades, who basically fucks his life beyond repair step by step.
I read it in my /r9k/ days and it was stirring to say the least.

I remember reading it and thinking that it was complete crap.
>every time I try to talk with someone feels as if I was in front of the gates of hell
Ridiculous

I don't know, I haven't revisited it in a long time but I remember it clicking with my "normies should be killed" attitude a few years ago

anything by dante

I'm just as ashamed as you are

Image: Sonia reads to Raskolnikov by Masterapocalypse66

Od'd on smack

Kokoro

Excellent book

LOL

Off the top of my head, No Longer Human was pretty sad, in a good way. Welcome to the NHK was also pretty sad. That type of subject matter always gets to me.

The Wedding, by Yann Queffelec

Animals are cheap shots.

The part of Castle to Castle where Celine talks about the day one of his dogs died was tough to get through. The other 300 pages (like the other 1000 pages if you count the whole trilogy) he's screaming piss and vinegar at literally everything on the face of the earth and then there's this one short chapter, a few pages, where he's just genuinely sad.

...

ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Колобок

Yeah. I know the story about Koblížek as well. Apparently it is a traditional Slavic fairy tale. I was in 3rd grade when we were made to learn and recite some of the verses (it was a poem) - memorizing was never my game and I actually forgot about the home assigment. Teacher called me on, I could recite it all, she gave me a 3 (=C). It was my first 3 and I cried like a little bitch. The frustration is still there.

On the Heights of Despair
The Book of Disquiet
Catcher in the Rye
Stoner

Honestly gonna ask for once.
Who the literal fuck cares about this girl? And for what possible reason?

>Run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the Kolobok

trying too hard to fit in

non-ironically storybro's adventures, both the sleepover and the roadtrip, although the roadtrip fucked me up more, i never read the third part, that shit was beyond sad

Non-fiction is almost cheating. I cried my way through Voices of Chernobyl too.

iirc kafka thinks of his works as comedic

Phaedo

That greentext about some guy's relationship with an underage girl.

Johnny Got His Gun made me tear up in some places, especially the crying out to the Mamas scene, or the scene where Johnny asks for death.

no. there seems to be a pretty even split between people who find his work hilarious and others who find it terribly depressing. i've noticed the same with Journey to the End of the Night.

I get shaken up by fucking Steinbeck of all authors. I can recognize how melodramatic some of it is while I'm reading it, but it hasn't stopped it from making me emotional during parts of Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden.

slightly related but this really sweet girl burst into tears in an English class where we were reading the murder of the family in A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Flowers for Algernon's last few hapters made me cry on a Japanese transit bus.

Disgrace by j.m coetzee

infinite jest

marry me, melancholy user

the one who died by being run over by a car?

No, the one where the 'plot twist' at the end is she got diddled by her father all along. It's crazy long for a Veeky Forums story.

my diary desu

Welcome to the NHK.

The Liliad?

xD

Yeah, that's the one, dude.

When I was 13 years old read the ending of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy in one sitting. It’s the only book that ever made me cry.

Little Father Time's final act in Jude the Obscure got me.

The Emigrants by Sebald

"Hunger" was pretty sad

I watched the show and it was complete shit. Is the book any better?

The Old Man and the Sea. Then again I don't read many sad books.

Christian Theodicy in general.

I thought the show was quite good actually. The book is worse than the show.

My first instinct is to insult you. What does that say about me?

The only reason stoner is sad is because of how real it is. I feel like every decision made in life is a wrong one and we have to own up to making do with what we got.

Tfw when the Lazarus scene also stuck with me, but then I read Nabokov's review of CandP and he specifically referrers to that scene as an example of Dostoyevsky being for plebs.

Honestly it didn't make me really sad, but the whole book just resonated so well with me that I still consider it one of if not my favorite book. I can't even put it into words how I felt while reading it.

Did you comfort her and eventually fall in love and marry her? Are you now living comfortably with her and your two beautiful children? Do you spend your time together discussing literature and the arts and appreciating each other's interests in the same things? Will you die together holding hands with no regrets because you know that you lived your life exactly how you would want and can both die happy because you found each other?

Great writer, terrible critic.

So?
Nabokov's opinion on Dostoyevsky is really unpopular. I believe that this was due to his own view of religion, as he was an atheist.

maybe

Oh fug, I was actually reading that again the other day since I still have these books on my shelves (the covers have De Chirico paintings on them which I love), it's so good.

It's The great Gatsby for me. A smart, self-made men who had the world by the throat falls because of the only person he has ever truly loved. That person didn't even love him back. It's tragic.

The rest of my recommendations have been already posted, some great books ITT.

>mfw I actually lived that for 1,5 years and our depression was too much to handle
>broke up, attempted suicide on he same day without coordination
>I'm sort of an alcoholic now I suppose
>she's a prescription junkie last I heard

At least we're Veeky Forums as fuck kek

Yeah, I don't agree with him or anything (I can actually think for myself) I just thought it was interesting that my favorite part of the book was specifically referred to as being the shittiest.

what are you gay?