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hermetic

(8,310 posts)
Wed Mar 20, 2024, 02:36 PM Mar 20

The Most Emotionally-Charged Books Ever

A well-told story can make you feel so many things — sadness or joy, frustration or delight, anxiety or calmness. The BuzzFeed Community weighed in on the most emotionally charged books they've read.
I've read a few of these and will likely read quite a few more now. Not all of these are fiction. At the link you'll find a little bit about each one.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Green Mile by Stephen King

In Love by Amy Bloom

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahloewentheil/most-emotionally-charged-books?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

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The Most Emotionally-Charged Books Ever (Original Post) hermetic Mar 20 OP
Thanks for posting! I've only read 2 or 3, so I'm keeping the list. MLAA Mar 20 #1
I have read several of these leftieNanner Mar 20 #2
Nice list! Bookmarking. Thank you. Scrivener7 Mar 20 #3
I've read quite a few of these NanaCat Mar 20 #4
"The Road" is the only one of those I've read. Jeebo Mar 20 #5
I haven't read The Road NanaCat Mar 23 #6

leftieNanner

(15,149 posts)
2. I have read several of these
Wed Mar 20, 2024, 03:01 PM
Mar 20

Truly gut wrenching.

The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns were both wonderful.

NanaCat

(1,251 posts)
4. I've read quite a few of these
Wed Mar 20, 2024, 03:59 PM
Mar 20

And it seems to be a mixed bag.

First of all, most of them are quite new. And that's a problem, given that several books of greater age are far more emotional. But never mind that.

I'll agree with Kite Runner, Thousand Splendid Suns and The Nightingale. Some of the others make no sense, though.

A bunch of the others make me wonder if I read the same book they did, and I keep asking myself if they confused what books they were reading with other works by the same writer. Like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but not Remains of the Day. Or One Hundred Years of Solitude, but not Love in the Time of Cholera.

And I'm gobsmacked that someone actually put The Hiding Place on anything but a potential 70s TV movie of the week list, and left off the far more visceral Diary of Anne Frank. That's just...blasphemy.

Jeebo

(2,026 posts)
5. "The Road" is the only one of those I've read.
Wed Mar 20, 2024, 09:26 PM
Mar 20

And I agree with its inclusion on this list. It was one of the ones I was thinking about before I started scrolling through the list. I have a copy of "Flowers for Algernon" because the Easton Press sent me a copy recently as one of the editions in their Masterpieces of Science Fiction series. I don't intend to read it, but I did see that movie with Cliff Robertson. I've also seen the movies "The Fault in Our Stars", "The Hiding Place" and "The Book Thief", and also "The Road" a year or two after I read the novel. I never read the book when I've already seen the movie, because the movie is a spoiler.

-- Ron

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