Random query of the day

[tree_and_leaf]

Having been reminded, by discussion on wemyss' journal, of the wonders of Anthony Price (and those of you who don't know them, should), it also occurs to me that Tomorrow's Ghost is one of the few books I've cried over. I don't, as it happens, cry very easily, and when I do it's usually more to do with fatigue than emotion, but there you are: Tomorrow's Ghost, the end of Effi Briest, and the final chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (not, however, the death scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).*

Which makes me wonder what books or scenes in books other people find particularly affecting?

* If we bring films into it, then we must add Ring of Bright Water - I was fond of otters, and the killing of a pet one as a pest came as a bit of a shock at eight - and Spock's death scene in Star Trek II.

Comments

[eagles-rock.livejournal.com]

'Watership Down'. "Talking rabbits" snorted my mother; there'd been no Beatrix Potter in my youth, nor even Paddington, but I was ten by then, the choice was mine and I had been moved to howling by my first, and possibly only, talking-animal book.

Len Deighton 'Goodbye Mickey Mouse'. World War II bomber epic. I was a teenager. No idea if it's really any good or not.

Albert Camus 'The First Man', semi-autobiography. Unbelievably moving. Not a false note in it.

Random acts of kindness and the pains of poverty-enforced emigration generally get to me. I can't remember if I cried at 'Christ Stopped at Eboli' but I know I was badly shaken for days. But then 'Danny Boy' sung a particular way can stop me in my tracks, so I'm a sucker for that.

I actively avoid certain periods of history so that I don't cry at a badly written book, and don't put myself through a well-written book.

[tree_and_leaf]

Watership Down is magnificent. Have you read The Plague Dogs? It's also excellent, and has splendid illustrations by Wainwright.

Random acts of kindness and the pains of poverty-enforced emigration generally get to me.

There's a line in a song called, I think, the Highland Exile's Lament which always breaks my heart, although the rest of the poem is so-so:

From the lonely shieling and the misty island
Mountains divide us and the waste of seas
But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

And then there's the Border Ballad about the knight betrayed by his love:

'Mony's the ane for him maks mane
But none sall ken where he is gane
Ower his white bones, when they be bare
The wind sall blow for ever mair.'

'She moved through the fair' also always shakes me, though that's as much terror as pathos.

Paddington, incidentally, is really partly an allegory about refugees.