What's the saddest book you have read?

The Bell Jar. Identified strongly with Plath, wanted her to fight her way out like some cheesy action film, but no. No brilliant escape takes place. Her character suffers, futilely.

A natural history book which described the long future of our planet

Stoner

I cried for an hour after that ending, felt like my soul was screaming for the indignation of his life

shantaram

Churchill's biography of Marlborough.

For all his triumphs, the death scene with Marlborough's children and wife openly bickering over worldly goods around his dying but lucid body was depressing as fuck.

The ending scene of the Karamazov brothers also made me cry
the one with Alexei Fyodorovitch and his speech to the children

Don Quixote is probably the closest to making me cry. The ending is bound to break anybody's heart.

youtube.com/watch?v=QzXGdy8Et30

the soldier living in the woods in fear of getting strangled and waiting for the guy who promised to die of pneumonia was very bitter to think about. it's a great black humor.

>tfw when you and yossarian realise that most of the characters are dead.

Talking about Heller - I'd say pic related, but it's not really sadness but something more abstract.

Semi-related. What is the book equivalent of Gummo? Who is the Harmony Korine of literature?

tess of the d'urbervilles

Silence by Shusaku Endo

ripped my scrotum wide open tbqh famalam

All Quiet on The Western Front

literally my diary, desu ;__;

Journey to the end of night
Virgin suicides
Never let me go
Remains of the day
Mason and dixon
Once and future king

Ummmmm a mix of tao lin
Paulo lins
Jg Ballard
Anthony burroughs

I legitimately had to hold back a tear or two when the little boy asked for breadcrumbs to be sprinkled on his grave so that he may make friends with the sparrows.

Felt like the end of a journey finishing BK, absolutely life-changing.

Sad books are dime a dozen, but here are some particular kinds of sadness that really've stuck with me.

The Tunnel is mourning for the soul, "sad" here being almost as in "wow, that guy is sad" - a painful combination of pity, dissapointment and disgust, as you see a miserable person and try to distance yourself as far as possible, yet realise that whatever boils and withers inside him is not at all alien and creeps worryingly ever-close to own's being.

Rings of Saturn is pure, unadulturated melancholy, and it reads and feels like a clip-show at the end of the universe. A ceremonious waltz of death among the already-here and yet-to-be ruins to the tune of inhuman coldness and entropy. And yet, despite this entropy, it is very ordered, gentle, a complicated and somberly beautiful burial rite.

Does anyone have that image with all those philosophers + Elliot Rodgers and Adam Lanza? It said SADBOYZ at the top and had a bunch of depressing quotes

I had this experience, and will never forget the little girl across the street whose mother sends her over to be blessed by 'the great man' before he dies-- 'Bless you, my child.'

>simple (or rather preternatural) things like this just don't happen anymore.

every Raúl Zurita's work

Vertigo is also quite sad, though RoS is sadder. Both are profoundly Melancholy.

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai is extremely moving.

Romulus, My father.

All The Light We Cannot See was p. sad. At least the Berlin chapter.

Kafka makes me sad.

if you rip out the final chapter, Counting by Sevens is a very sad book.

Marley&Me for sure

Sounds promising. Also I was pretty sad in parts and definitely at the end of flowers for Algernon. That last line brought a tear to my eye for the first time from a book......

This

Kafka makes me mad.

Kafka makes me laugh.

my diary, desu

Man's Search for Meaning.

The only sad things I've read that affected me in any meaningful way were visual novels.

this. anime is an infinitely superior artform

I was pretty sad I wasted time on it.

The letters of Vincent van Gogh

There's one in particular that I thought was very touching. It's the first letter he wrote to his brother after a year of silence. There was a falling-out because his family had wanted to hospitalize him.

vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let155/letter.html

Yes, it truly is an extremely beautiful and sad ending to one of the undoubtedly greatest novels of history. At the same time however, there is a sense of hope and appreciation for human nature and the human conditions... Not in that suffering or any quasi-utopian ideals may in any way be realized or that better side of human nature might one day triumph in the wake of a genuine humanism, but at least that individually we can all find solace, comfort, and a sense of spiritual "community" (for lack of a better word - something like an escape from the confines of our phenomenologically solipsistic subjectivity) in our mutual human suffering, joy, presence within this world, and most of all, love.

>Once and future king
I could never get past the part where Merlin turned the boy and himself into geese. I swear to God the author justs kept descriping geese for pages and pages and pages. I put it down and never picked it up again. Granted I was twelve at the time. Should I try it again?

I wouldn't necessarily say its "superior" to the classics of world literature, bu Yu-Gi-Oh and Naruto mangas are probably some of the greatest contemporary art - both from a literary and visual perspective.

Watership Down

Some memoirs in Tours of Duty
All Quiet on the Western Front

Probably kokoro

Honestly all the lessons are kinda boring but totally necessary and once they are done the books pacing is rapid fire hilarity and wild adventures and it never slows down. The first bit is a drag.

Shit, I gotta read Brothers Karamazov now.

This. Wish Watership Down got more love on here. It's a sold, well-researched, well-personified enjoyable adventure book for children of all ages. I will read it to my own children one day that's for sure.

What?... autism?

Man's search for Memeing

that approaching by beta males must be truly unbearable

Agape Agape (my phone doesn't support macrons) was pretty devastating as Gaddis' final work.

checked

Good book, too

only book that ever made me cry was Of Mice and Men

I agree that The Rings of Saturn is "an anatomy of melancholy" but it didn't make me sad. Perhaps I was too piqued by the novelty of its approach. It is profoundly lonely as well; it breathes loneliness.

I think Steinbeck writes sadness-inducing stories the best of any writer. Both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men gave me heaving sobs. Jane Eyre I think is one of the saddest love stories I've ever read.

The Recognitions at times is definitely up there as well in the saddest books I have ever read. I related a little too much to Wyatt's relationship with his father and the resultant displacement he feels. He feels unwanted wherever he goes.

Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner.

this desu

Fuck

Your diary desu.

thirded,

this one

Kafka's trial,
and Morphene by Bulgakov - saddest and most empowering at the same time if you get it.

Remains of the Day

...

Yeah Night and The Brothers Karamazov

...

The Bible

Jesus getting crucified was not what I expected

The Cosmos by Carl Sagan. The sheer amount of awesomeness of the universe described in the book literally brought tears to my eyes.

Spoiler alert that shit

Is it good though? Is her prose really up to the 'watermark'?

>Mason and dixon
???
I've read a 100 pages. It's the funniest thing i've read in a long time. This is going to take a massive turn it seems. FU Pynchie