depressing books ?

[Gemby!]

which book have you read that has actually depressed you a little ?

preferably because of its sad content and not because it was crap :rolleyes:

reading WW1 books right now and i have to say they have pretty much all depressed me so far.....im crying too much over these books me thinks :(

[MagicNakor]

Been a few of them...I can't recall many at the moment (since I'm dead beat...), but Jude the Obscure certainly isn't a lighthearted romp in the park.

:shuriken:

[Cheese]

The most recent book I read that genuinely saddened me was Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The disintegration of African culture due to colonial Europe depicted in the novel is upsetting and makes you quite angry at the same time.

[DarthInsinuate]

the Identity Crisis comic books made me cry twice in it's seven issue run

[Santa]

the plague - albert camus

the outsider - albert camus

and basically anything written by Russians

have fun

[Lasher]

the Identity Crisis comic books made me cry twice in it's seven issue run
lol, it really wasn't that serious, I read the complete seven issues at a go and I didn't sniffle even once :lol:

[Cheese]

Woman in White by Wilkie Collins made me suicidal. 500 pages of the most banal musings of Victorian middle-classed persons as they plod their way through a very average mystery.

[Afronaut]

Is Hustler a book, eh?

[LikesWine]

Is Hustler a book, eh?
:lol: :lol:
It's more like Playboy makes me depressed. Even when I was 20 I never looked like that. :cry:

The Cry and the Convenant - Morton Thompson...first read this back when I was 16 and it utterly depressed me. It makes one appreciate how much medicine has advanced and how utterly, utterly stupid/naive doctors were back then. To actually go from the autopsy room to the delivery room :sick:

If even slightly interested in medicine and haven't read this book...a must to read.

[Carcinus]

"The Woman Who Walked Into Doors" - Roddy Doyle.

A cheery tale of domestic violence and self-delusion. :(

[Monkeee]

Flowers for Algernon, it made a little bit teary at the end.

[SirGray]

Damn emo books lol just kidding I would have to say A book called "Where the red fern grows" something like that is sad.

[Skweeky1]

All of Kafka's books.

And 'Spider' from Patrick McGrath.

[Biggles]

A book we discussed recently in another thread

Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks

[Skweeky1]

The Wasp factory, there's an other one.

and Watership down just makes me bubble all the way through it.

Those poo-hooor bunny wa-aa-aahhbits.:cry:

[Snee]

A book we discussed recently in another thread

Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks
I felt more sorry for the guy in The Algebraist.

Don't ask me why, tho' :ermm:


I've read lots of depressing books, Hiroshima is one.
Angela Carter's Fireworks is another.

[slayer of soul]

Mary Shelly- Frankenstein

[Skweeky1]

That's not depressing. I've just finished reading that.

[jetje]

Couldn't easily find english translations, but by far the most depressing writer ever is Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski.
'Der idiot' and 'Schuld und Sühne' are very depressing.
a quote stolen from a review on amazon.de
'Dostoyevsky's rendering of 18th-century Russia emerges unscathed, bringing the dark pathos (such as wretched poverty and rampant suffering) to life.'
Don't blame me that you'll get suicidal after reading his books.

[MagicNakor]

I really enjoyed Crime and Punishment, but The House of the Dead] is also a good read.

:shuriken:

[Carcinus]

I love "The House of the Dead". It's an amazing book.

Lucky, by Alice Seabold. The true story of her rape, the trial and the effects on herself, her family and her friends.

Very sad.

[JPaul]

Down and Out in Paris and London. George Orwell.

That's good for a laugh.

[Carcinus]

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Can't be arsed to check whether it's already been mentioned, but it's one of the most depressing books known to man.

[manker]

I used to read my Mam and Dad's books, because they were there, before I started going to the park and drinking cider.

Dad's Tom Clancy, Wilbur Smith and Egyptology books were great and stood me in good stead for appreciating and understanding stuff but Mam's Virginia Andrews must have had the opposite effect.

Flowers in the Attic and the subsequent four or five books which depicted the lives of the incestuous, dysfuntional children who were locked in an attic and slowly poisoned with arsenic was particularly depressing prose.

Looking back, I'm surprised that they let the twelve year old me read them :dabs:

[JPaul]

Flowers in the Attic and the subsequent four or five books which depicted the lives of the incestuous, dysfuntional children who were locked in an attic and slowly poisoned with arsenic was particularly depressing prose.

Looking back, I'm surprised that they let the twelve year old me read them :dabs:
Maybe they saw it as a bit of escapism from an otherwise wholly Welsh childhood.

[manker]

Flowers in the Attic and the subsequent four or five books which depicted the lives of the incestuous, dysfuntional children who were locked in an attic and slowly poisoned with arsenic was particularly depressing prose.

Looking back, I'm surprised that they let the twelve year old me read them :dabs:
Maybe they saw it as a bit of escapism from an otherwise wholly Welsh childhood.They were merkin children, locked away in t'attic.

So, yeah, I think that's a given, mate :unsure:

[JPaul]

Maybe they saw it as a bit of escapism from an otherwise wholly Welsh childhood.They were merkin children, locked away in t'attic.

So, yeah, I think that's a given, mate :unsure:
Probably what gave you the dellusions of adequacy. They probably realized it would.

[manker]

They were merkin children, locked away in t'attic.

So, yeah, I think that's a given, mate :unsure:
Probably what gave you the dellusions of adequacy. They probably realized it would.I can see what you did with the 'z' in 'realise', however I wasn't aware that they'd started adding an extra 'l' in the middle of words.

Mind, I can't keep up with merkins and their car-azy spelling :crazy:

[JPaul]

Probably what gave you the dellusions of adequacy. They probably realized it would.I can see what you did with the 'z' in 'realise', however I wasn't aware that they'd started adding an extra 'l' in the middle of words.

Mind, I can't keep up with merkins and their car-azy spelling :crazy:
"Realize" is the preferred spelling given the context. "Realise" is better in relation to financial transactions etc.

But you knew that already, didn't you Rodrick.

The extraneous "l" I put down to keyboard hiccoughs. I need to look at the keyboard whilst typing and not the screen. A spare "l" is hard to see when scanning prior to posting. True story.

[manker]

tools workman bad A blames his.

Can someone please arrange the above words into an appropriate sentence given the context provided by JP, I'd do it myself but my monitor is on the blink :dabs:

[JPaul]

tools workman bad A blames his.

Can someone please arrange the above words into an appropriate sentence given the context provided by JP, I'd do it myself but my monitor is on the blink :dabs:
currently re-evaluating opinion of maker due to hair revelations.

[j2k4]

I once read a book about jungle diseases that was pretty depressing. :)

[DorisInsinuate]

Rob Liefeld's recent run of Teen Titans was really depressing.

[DieBuche]

--

[taityisagod]

J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" and Roman Frister's "The Cap or The Price of a Life", are books to make you contemplate suicide, "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys is devastating but life changing. Anything by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or John Steinbeck will never fail to inflict considerable dejection and for a really depressing historical read anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad".