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Post by Tange-Rhi-ne, Tange-Rhi-ne on Nov 17, 2003 22:45:15 GMT -5
I cry whenever I read Where the Red Fern Grows...I just think it's the saddest thing. I have a soft spot for animals, I guess, especially dogs. Ooh, I know there've been a couple of others that I cried at...hmm can't think of any. Eh well. But yeah. Where the Red Fern Grows. Very sad.
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MagPie
Gryffindor Alumni
Posts: 449
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Post by MagPie on Nov 18, 2003 17:29:52 GMT -5
I dont tend to cry at books, so I had a hard time thinking of sad books...but I was leaving the house this morning and passed my bookshelf and saw Amazing Grace by Jonothan Kozol. It's not a novel, it's nonfiction about kids in the South Bronx in NYC and how hard it is to grow up there and have a useful school experience.
Rhiannon, Where the Red Fern Grows gets me every time too...
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Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Nov 18, 2003 18:31:03 GMT -5
There is a book I read in elementary school about a cellar. This girl (picture on the front with red shorty curly hair, cellar door on front with trees around, looks like possibly a farm in the background...) goes into another world by entering through the cellar door...like she goes in, comes back out and she's in the past. Name of the book anyone? Anyway, it made me cry because I didn't want her to leave the other world at the end when she does because that meant I had to leave too. Yeah...kinda sad, I know.
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Ceridwen
Gryffindor Alumni
Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense
Posts: 604
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Post by Ceridwen on Nov 28, 2003 10:04:04 GMT -5
The last lines of my favourite book ever (well, ok, one of the books that tie for the honour of being my favourite book ever) is: 'The song ended. The children were alone with the broken windows of a slum'. For some reason, that always brings a tear to my eye. Possibly for the same reason as Cal, and her little girl with the cellar door - the children in this book had just been in a different world, and had been dragged back to reality too quickly. Sad, but that's how life is, I guess.
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Post by En on Nov 28, 2003 18:51:05 GMT -5
If anyone ever catches me reading Empire Falls by Richard Russo when I'm already bummed, kindly stop me.
Not that it's really a sad book. There was just a bit that hit exactly the wrong chord with me this week, and it is a sad bit, to do with one of the main characters' mums getting stuck in that uncomfortable place between mindless drudgery and destructive wishes. Meh to that; I say again meh.
Also want to point out that I really hate C.S. Lewis today for writing Til We Have Faces, which is based on Greek mythology and is not a children's book in the slightest.
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Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Nov 28, 2003 19:52:06 GMT -5
I finished reading The Magicians Nephew a few days ago and I thought that the ending was sad in the fact that the tree had to be cut down and was made into a wardrobe. It bothered me, I can't tell you why...it just did and when Narnia was being made...but it was a lot like the same sadness I associate when the land in the Neverending Story is being made again and I end up getting upset.
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Post by En on Jan 16, 2004 12:34:41 GMT -5
No, I get you. There is a sadness connected to the idea of destruction and creation, just as there is a joy as well. I think that's pretty consistently evident in all the great myths of the world. And I get sad about those things too. I mean, the tree being cut down, that's a big deal for a person obsessed with tree imagery, right -- like whenever someone cuts down a significant tree, for me, that relates to the death of Yggdrasil, the Norse Tree of the World, which would cause the complete collapse of the known universe; it also relates to individual, real famous trees being lost, with all the mystery and beauty of great age. It means all the spirits housed in the yews of cemeteries are lost and left to drift, and it means the Sky Anchors are cut loose, and it means Fangorn burning and Sherwood under siege and Birnam Wood on the march... The death of one tree has for me the echoes of all trees' deaths and lives. And that's the sense you're supposed to get, since so much of the human condition is that we are all lessened each time one of us dies, and yet we must die, and be born.[/JosephCambellimpersonation]
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Post by sparksy on Feb 10, 2004 19:37:49 GMT -5
What kind of person can write a book where the main character dies (in the text) (and not from old age)? I read The Sight by David Clement-Davies hoping it would be just as good as his first book, Fire Bringer, but almost all of the good people died including the main character.
Also, I read the "His Dark Materials" series, which included The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. I absolutely LOVED them, but the ending was SO SAD!. I reccomend them, tho.
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Post by En on Feb 11, 2004 12:10:25 GMT -5
*raises hand* Me!
But don't worry, the main character of the book I am writing doesn't die. I thought she was going to for a long time, and it would have made a load of sense if she had because of the stuff that happened to her (the next to last scene takes place in a burning house)... but then I realised it would make more sense if she lived.
I guess I feel that if stories don't tell us about death and how to deal with it, we would be even more inequipped to deal with death when it comes to people around us. I'm a firm believer in the theory that part of the point of literature is to teach us how to deal with things in real life, even if that's accomplished with metaphors and fantastical settings.
Not that there's not a place for escapism in fiction, too, but ultimately I think you are what you eat -- with books as well as food.
...I liked the His Dark Materials trilogy too, a lot, and partly because the writer wasn't afraid to write a sad ending.
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Post by sparksy on Feb 13, 2004 17:21:56 GMT -5
yea, i don't mind books that have a sad endng that fits, but books that are just sad for no apparent reason, those really get me going.
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Jameson
Slytherin Alumni
Beyond Redemption
Posts: 1,134
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Post by Jameson on Mar 9, 2004 16:06:49 GMT -5
The Farseer Trilogy/Tawny man books made me cry. I'm quite an emotional person and a lot of books bring tears to my eyes but these books had me really red eyed and sobbing. Robin Hobb's writing seems to hit that emotional chord within me. Having read all six books I felt like I had followed the main character, Fitz through his entire life - from a six year old dumped at the castle gates to a battle scarred middle aged man. I felt a real empathy for him and those he lost along the way. I think I get too involved in books. I get too emotionally involved and carried away by a story. Watership Down was sad, anything concerning animals usually sets me off. The end of Lord of the Rings made me cry, as in the appendix detailing the story of Aragorn and Arwen. It touched me that they'd had such a long and happy life together and that there was no great, dramatic death in battle. Aragorn died of old age and Arwen lay down under the Mallorn trees with nothing left to live for.
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Post by En on Mar 9, 2004 16:39:00 GMT -5
*musing* What is too carried away by a book? I mean, no, I don't want people reading HP and then developing an absolute conviction that they must become Draco Malfoy, to the point that they quit their jobs and spend their retirement savings on gel to slick their hair back, but... I think there's a trend in Western society right now to discourage people from a healthy deep involvement with a story. I see absolutely nothing wrong with crying over a book; I wish more books made people cry, or more people were willing to cry over books, anyway.
guin said something over at the cinema about adults not playing enough, and that seems dead on -- how many adults can't remember the last book they read? Many remember reading one; many are reading one. But most can't tell you what it's About about, just what it's about, and that's only if they're reading it right now or just finished it. Like, "There's this woman and she falls in love with this man but he goes off to war and gets killed."
But have they noticed that the author is really driving at our culture's disparate teachings about war to men and women? No. Do they care? Seldom. Did they stay up all night to finish it, cry over the ending, and stay up looking out at the tree in the back garden, imagining it to be the same tree as the one in the book, imagining the heroine in her hoops and shawl standing beneath the tree? Not a chance.
And I think they're the poorer for it.
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Jameson
Slytherin Alumni
Beyond Redemption
Posts: 1,134
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Post by Jameson on Mar 9, 2004 17:23:52 GMT -5
Don't get me started. 'Western society' is becoming a bad term in my vocabulary. I don't feel like I fit in with society. Maybe it's the circle of friends I hang around with, I don't know, it just feels like I'm different, the average person I know doesn't really read, let alone cry at books. They didn't see any of the Lord of the Rings films because they were too long and complicated. I think thats why I started using the internet so much. It was the only way I could get to communicate with like minded people. For so long I've tried to fit in with the general mentality, gone along with the crowd and hidden my real interests but it made me very unhappy. I'm finally learning to be who I really am and not worry about what other people think. There seems to be this enormous apathy amongst the general public. But where is this conditioning coming from? Why can't we still play as we get older? Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up and you'll probably get an interesting answer. Ask an adult a silmilar question and you're more likely to be greeted with silence or uncertainty. As children we are conditioned to 'be realistic' and to 'stop day dreaming' to the extent that we lose our dreaming power in adulthood. So many people tend to drift through life without plans or designs trying to create goals that the critical mind regards as 'appropriate' or 'possible'. However the individual is not motivated to achieve these goals which are not true to their hearts. Sorry I'm going right off topic here.
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Post by En on Mar 10, 2004 11:53:07 GMT -5
Tangents are not off-topic Or if they are, I'm in huge trouble.
Ditto, ditto and ditto. If people walk through life refusing to read/watch stories because they're too complicated, what will they do when their own lives get messy? Refuse to show up?
Stories teach us ways of dealing with essential parts of being human (loss, heavy responsibility, micro- and macro-politics, love, family or lack of it, etc). If we don't take the time to know stories, to feel something about stories, then we won't know how to feel about life; we won't know why we're here, or what we can hope for, or what we can hope to do. To avoid stories is to avoid living.
Studies show that in Western society, children's genders are fixed by the age of two. By the age of fourteen, they are generally so busy trying to be mistaken for eighteen that they sacrifice the right to be playful, wondering, curious. By twenty-five, with the present Western economy and lack of social structures to support people in their needs and relationships, most are once-divorced, working jobs they hate and wishing they hadn't 'destroyed' their lives. (Mind, they're only a third of the way into their lives, according to most census life-expectancy data.) By fifty, after twenty-five more years of prostituting themselves to a job they hate (and after another failed marriage and probably a major religious disillusionment), they turn to doctors to provide some sense that someone is paying attention to them, though they have to pay vast sums of money to these medicos, shrinks, etc. to get the attention. At seventy-five, chucked into a nursing home and left with nothing to do other than watch daytime TV, they waste away and die.
This is what happens to people who believe that they should put aside stories as they grow up. If we go only to blockbusters and read only dime novels, we are consenting to a life in which other people take as little interest in our lives, our personal stories, as we take in these cheap excuses for mythology. And without the connections to other people -- without the willingness to treat another person with the same wonder we'd treat Narnia or Hogwarts or Middle-Earth -- without that kind of love from other people -- we are fated to that grey and empty life.
I blame a lot of factors, but one I blame most of all is Paul the so-called Apostle. In one of his pompous, self-righteous little fits, he boasted that "When I was a child, I thought as a child... but when I became a man, I put aside childish things." Too bad everything he put aside was everything Jesus stood for: love, understanding, forgiveness, and a love for story. I'm no Christian, but I can sure dig a teacher who shares his ideas in parables with images so lasting, they're still part of everyday life two millenia later.
[/rant]
Here's one quote I keep round to remind myself to stay out of the trap.We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical means, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which must not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. --from Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
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Post by RainFrost on Mar 13, 2004 11:49:21 GMT -5
I read this one book by Sara Douglass called Hade's Daughter. I didnt actually cry but it got me really sad when I was finishd with it. It's the first part of a triology but I'm a little scared to go on.
What made me sad was that one of the main charecters (it was told by several people) was this 14 year old girl who lived in a city state and was a princess (it was set 100 years after the fall of Troy). Most Trojans had become slaves and the city-state her father ruled had a ton of slaves. The last royalty of Troy was this guy lets call him Bob (dont remeber his name) and he came and freed the slaves and took the girl for his wife, her names was Bobbiet (cant remember her name either). Well she wasnt happy with this arrangement and tried to stop him from leaving the city taking all the slaves with him, but people ended up dying but not that so many people died.
She makes other mistakes but they arent her fault. she was controlled by this other women who was very powerful and wanted Bob for herself.
Long story short: she comes to love him but he hates her and tries to kill her several times and when he becomes powerful he makes the other woman his queen even though they are still married, and he treats her horribly until they die.
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