Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Broke Your Heart a Little

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish.

This week's topic is a bit tricky for me, since I have a strict happy ending policy.  If it ends unhappily, I don't want to read it.  However, there are books that end happily and have sad parts, which are what I listed below.

WARNING:  This post contains spoilers!

1. Most of the Harry Potter books, especially Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.  So many great characters die.  But, that made it realistic.  They were fighting a war after all.  It would have been extremely unbelievable if all the good characters had lived.

2. Inheritance by Christopher Paolini.  This one was disappointing since it broke my happy ending policy, and I hadn't expected it.   Every character that I liked was in tears for the last few pages.  I think I would have liked it better if after Eragon's final sob he had said something better than "We are not alone."  However, that really was the only good thing in his life right then, so it was really the only thing he could say.

3. Carry on Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham. Every time I got attached to a character, they died.  All but one of the good female characters died.  It was a good book, and I liked it despite all the deaths.

4.  Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.  Okay, I'm still reading this one, but Fantine dies without getting to see Cosette one last time. So sad.

5. ..... Um.......hmm.... I seem to have run out of books, or at least the memory of them.  If I come up with more books later, I'll update this post.

Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day!  

6 comments:

  1. I like this list. I've read at two of the books (Carry On Mr. Bowditch and guess which other one), and heard of one more (Les Mis). I actually liked Carry On Mr. Bowditch because number one, Nathaniel Bowditch is a huge figure in the world of sailing (his studies made it possible for people to sail places without wrecking due to miscalculations, and my family is a sailing one), and my dad, a former merchant marine, has a copy of volume one of the American Practical Navigator, his book, downstairs. It's big, green, and has everything and anything you'd need to know to sail anywhere. But I don't remember the book all that much.

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    1. I had to read Mr. Bowditch for a literature class, and it was the best of the four books we read (in my opinion anyway). The funny thing is, my little sister just read it for her lit class and hated it. Go figure. My (then) lit teacher's family sails and they had a copy of one of Bowditch's books. I don't remember which one though.

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  2. Well, nice list! Happy Valentine's day to you as well :) ;)

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  3. With you on Harry Potter and Les Mis--which, oh sweetie! Brace yourself for the rest of that book.

    My big happy/weepy book right now is Cold Sassy Tree. It's wonderful. And I want to smack it for it's ending, although it is mostly happy. Sort of. Mainly. The narrator is a 14 year old boy and he is hilarious. The adult characters are wonderful, seen through his eyes. Not because they are flawless--they're definitely not--but because of his take on them.

    Fun post!

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