The 10 Most Emotional Books I've Ever Read

As we've reached Part 10 of my 20 Books of 2020 series (that means we're at the 200th book!) I have devised a little milestone article for the occasion. These books are very close to my heart and I remember the first reading experiences like the back of my hand - I hope you have either read some (or all) of them or are planning to. Hopefully, they will give you a similar feeling to what they gave me...

I've read some pretty emotional books in my time but there's nothing like a book that leaves you completely speechless after finishing it. But the worst part about that is knowing that you could never go back and relive that experience and no matter how many times you re-read it, you can't recreate that single experience of reading it for the first time and having that emotional overload. It sort of washes over you and leaves you completely breathless- it's a very difficult thing to describe and not every book does it to every person. But I think I've picked out the ten books that did it for me in different ways. Some made me angry, some made me cry, some made me lob the book against the wall when it was over and some literally turned me inside out. So, let's have a look at the ten books that I thought were the most emotional reading experiences I've ever had without any further introduction.

The 10 Most Emotional Books I've Ever Read

10. Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

“I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years”

As with most all of James Baldwin's books, this novel is emotional carnage. About a man who dies and his brother having to piece together his existence to find out what happened and why, it takes you on an emotional journey through the heart of musical Black America. It is the beating grip of the oppression they faced and the way in which his brother explains who he was as a person always makes me cry - because seriously, it's just so upsetting. Baldwin is one of the best people to write emotion and this book is the proof of it.

9. The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

“There’s an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can’t be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can’t add to it.”

This one was an experience for my diaries! I started reading this one night whilst I was pacing around on the downstairs floor of my house. However, I then quickly ran upstairs whilst still reading the book and started crying. Why? Well, it's the protagonist - a 26 year old girl who works at a post office during the outbreak of war who has no future, no life, no friends or family who care about her. She simply looks after her emotionally distant mother who is dying and she wastes away at the post office. It's a horrid, horrid and so damn emotional book. The descriptions are so vivid and wild - it's just what you expect from Zweig. This book made me cry really bad. I haven't cried like that in a long, long time. This is the kind of book that makes you cry from the beginning.

8. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”

When I first read this book I was in university, yes I was late to the party. But I cannot describe in words how that book made me feel. For a long time afterwards, I was obsessed with it. All the rush of emotion, all the tragedy and heartbreak, all the anger and the resentment that it had and yet, it ended in this strange haze between good and right. The book is incredibly good at putting the human condition into words. There is something striking about this book when you read it for the first time - it's like your heart is constantly breaking and then mending throughout until the very last word. You just feel so overwhelmed whilst reading it, it really is a thing of pure beauty.

7. The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

“There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar's life - from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the academy - when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one's thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one.”

This one really made me cry. I was reading it a few years ago and yes, I was reading it in order to emotionally prepare for the film. But, when I read the book - there was this overhaul of emotion that just sinks into your existence. It's like you're living and growing into a person with Lili and discovering her as she discovers herself. It's one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read and I didn't think it would work in third person but it did. It's a brilliant achievement of a novel and it kind of makes you feel really emotionally heartbroken at the end because of her untimely death. There's so much to the personality of Lili that I never thought that a book would be able to sum her up - but it did well of telling us her story.

6. The Early Stories by Truman Capote

"I was eight the first time I saw Miss Belle Rankin. It was a hot August day. The sun was waning in the scarlet-streaked sky, and the heat was rising dry and vibrant from the earth..."

I have always loved reading Truman Capote but when I discovered his early short stories, I couldn't resist. I sat there all afternoon reading the book and then, when it was over - I read it again. Some of these stories, Capote wrote as a teenager and young man. The kind of things that raced through my brain at that time were 'I could never write something like that at his age..." it was awe-inspiring to see such a young person with so much talent. Stories like "Ms. Belle Rankin" are amongst some of the best things about this book but ultimately it comes down to being able to see the forming genius of what will become the writer of "In Cold Blood" and "Answered Prayers" etc. Truman Capote was a genius and this book proves that he had always been such.

5. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fibre, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathise. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”

I have read this book a multitude of times since its release and I can honestly say it really does hit the same way. However, I cannot replicate the exact emotion I had when I first read it. The book is told through many different points of view through many different time periods and has some of the most breathtaking lines I've ever read. It is a complete work of art with chronology that takes you forwards and backwards through time, you realise that every single time frame is happening now - we don't live linear. My favourite character was always Robert Frobisher, even when the film came out my favourite character was Frobisher. I think he experiences near on every single emotion known to man throughout this book from love to remorse to guilt to depression to elation to confusion and back again. His story is absolutely brilliant. You really don't realise how clever this book is until you read it and by the time you finish it you want to read it again. I continuously revisit my copy which is now labelled with various post-it notes and flaggers. I will never stop revisiting that book I don't think. It is far too expansive. It's almost otherworldly.

4. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”

I remember when I read this book for the first time I was in my second year of my undergraduate degree at university. I couldn't stop thinking about it after that. The book had made me cry from the very beginning because it starts off with this absolute acceptance of death and the requirement to move on and get things done quickly. I always felt sorry for Rosa's Sister and yet, I couldn't feel bad for Esteban. The characters felt like you were living with them and the magic realism element to the book plunged me back into the world of Latin American Fiction. I was so surprised that I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would and by the end of it, I was absolutely weeping. The ending is one of the most beautiful, iconic and yet most baffling endings I've ever read. It is very symbolic and you'll only understand how it's symbolic if you read the book.

3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

"That had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

Don't pretend like you didn't expect this to be on the list - you all know about my relationship with this book. The very first time I read it I was about 16 years' old and I'm not going to lie, I had to take notes on who was related to who and that made the reading process longer. But I not only felt accomplished in the end, I was also really upset. I was upset for Anna and then for Dolly because her husband had an affair, I felt sorry for Levin because he was so alone until he met Kitty and I even felt sorry for Anna's child. I felt bad for Oblonsky who did the best he could with what he had, I felt angry at Karenin for not treating his wife right. I was angry at Stefan for cheating on Dolly. But in the end, I had such a mix of emotions, I couldn't read anything for the next 24 hours because I was still living in Russia with all these high society characters who had each, in themselves, done so much wrong and right and tried their best - but in the end, it didn't really make very much right for Anna. Even if everyone else resolved themselves, I still felt so bad for her. My favourite part of the book though, will always be the description of Levin's big, empty house at Part 1, Chapter 27 - I always revisit that description if I revisit anything in the book. I go back and re-read it over and over because it is one of the most beautiful, iconic and yet tragic descriptions of character I have ever read.

2. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

“Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

My reading experience of this book was fairly interesting. This was another one I read whilst I was at university, I think I was in my first year. I was sitting in at work in the foyer area and it was just me and the receptionist. I was reading this book whilst she worked and then, when I finished it, I slammed it against the wall by throwing it one and started crying. It's one of those books where you just want people to actually talk to each other instead of keeping their feelings to themselves. There's so much tragedy in the book that I felt I was never going to get over it. The more I read it, the more consumed I became by it and I just sat there and finished the book at work, then came the consequences. I was literally in tears and crying and weeping, it was horrible. The ending to the book is so symbolic and yet, it leaves you with a big empty space where characters like Ralph, Patrick and Meggie's Brother should've been. It's an awfully emotional book so if you're looking to read it, please take your time and savour it. It will emotionally destroy you.

More Mentions:

The Impatience of the Heart by Stefan Zweig

Stephen by Amy Cross

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill

Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Number One:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”

When I first read this book I was about 15 years' old and again, I won't lie, I had to take notes. However, the way this book made me feel afterwards was as if my soul had been torn out of my body and that I was slowly and surely dying. This book is so dark and it almost feels that when you've finished it, you've been abandoned. There is so much evil and hate in this book for relatives and friends, so much cunning and deception - I don't think I've ever read characters so three dimensional in my entire life. I keep revisiting this book to remind myself of the language which is raw and coarse with emotional distance. I keep revisiting this book also to remind myself that evil exists and that there are liars and cheaters out there, but there are also good people (like Alyosha). But the main reason I always revisit this book is for it, once again, to leave me speechless through its ideology, through its symbolism of money and the law and through its family politics which disintegrate right before your eyes.