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Books that churn you up

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    Books that churn you up

    The books equivalent of the thread Rogin started on Film about films that have you in tears.

    When packing for our recent holiday trip, I thought I should get back into Dickens, and vaguely remembered being v impressed by Dombey and Son when I read it aged 17, so I took that with me. I had to stop at the end of the first short chapter, it was more than I could cope with in my current emotionally fragile state. Talk about 0 to 60 in 3 seconds - the opening chapter is the death of Son's mother from childbirth complications, as the awful emotional void Dombey sits in pompous obliviousness and their elder child, a girl of six or so, clings desperately to her dying frame. Bloody hell.

    #2
    The Road.

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      #3
      A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

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        #4
        The first time I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, aged around 22, the end really got me.

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          #5
          A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
          Excellent choice, Jah.

          Great Expectations and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens had that knack.

          Roots way back when I was 12. Infact my choice of career (sociology of race) traces back to that book and TV series indirectly.

          I was wondering if non-fiction ever does this; descriptions of deaths and so on in biographies; accounts of atrocities.

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            #6
            Originally posted by ooh aah View Post
            The Road.
            Oh yeah, same here.

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              #7
              Hardy again, but Jude the Obscure more than Tess.

              Of more recent novels, I found Catherine O'Flynn's debut, What Was Lost, incredibly moving.

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                #8
                Animal Farm, particularly the way Boxer was treated by the pigs. The cruelty really got to me when I read it as a teenager.

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                  #9
                  Yes, Animal Farm's a good call. Jane Eyre is another for me, specifically the part with the death of Helen Burns, which Bronte based on what happened to her older sisters.

                  No sympathy for Oscar Wilde's view of The Old Curiosity Shop, I take it?

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                    #10
                    Charlotte’s Web.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by ooh aah View Post
                      The Road.
                      I read The Road when we were on holiday in the Whitsundays and my wife thought I'd got a call to say someone had died when I walked out of the toilet in our hotel room a bubbling mess....

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                        #12
                        The end of Soldados de Salamina
                        .......”.........Grant and I


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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post

                          I was wondering if non-fiction ever does this; descriptions of deaths and so on in biographies; accounts of atrocities.
                          I think it was Peter Hennessy's book Never Again that had a passage about the Hull blitz. One particular account (more poignant because in local dialect, which I won't attempt to recreate) was simply an old man whose wife had been killed, and he said he didn't know what he would do without her, because he couldn't read and she used to tell him what was in the paper. That detail sent me over the edge.

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                            #14
                            The first time I read the Stephen King short "the things they left behind ",at the end I was wiping away tears. I was in work at the time so it could have been embarrassing had anyone noticed.

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