Just to cheer you all up, most depressing reads

Culture
1

Dreadful weather, so to cheer you all up here's a list of the most depressing reads:


• Thomas Hardy: Jude The Obscure


• Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary


• John Steinbeck: Of Mice And Men


• Sylvia Plath: The Bell jar


• Cormac McCarthy: The Road


• JM Coetzee: Disgrace


• Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome


• Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road


• Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts


• Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms


• Arthur Koestler: Darkness At Noon


• Graham Greene: The End Of The Affair


• Carson McCullers: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter


• Joseph Conrad: The Heart Of Darkness


• William Golding: Lord Of The Flies


• Ian McEwan: Atonement


• Upton Sinclair: The Jungle


• Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front


• Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment


• Franz Kafka: The Trial


unless you know better...

2

I'm reading "The Museum of Innocence" by Orhan Pamuk which is beautifully written but so dark that It deserves a place your depressing list. I must be in the mood for misery because I keep plodding on waiting for a glimmer of light.

3

Somewhere along the line we have all forgotten Solzhenitsyn - 'Cancer Ward' and 'The Gulag Archipelago' are utterly depressing by the most cheerful appraisal.

4

I can highly recommend Ten Steps to Happiness by Daisy Waugh - it is a really sweet, funny story and always cheers me up! x

5

Angela’s Ashes is beautiful but you do need a box of Kleenex by your side.
Given one of the articles on today’s news it’s also an informative read.

6

Never tried AA but from what I have heard, I would have to agree with Sarah!

As for the rest, I seem to have read most of them. Hmm...

Just finished the JK Rowling 'grown up' book - have various comments re the earlier discussion (but haven't time to post today as have blog posts to finish writing so you will have to wait for my thoughts you lucky, lucky, people...) but, it did make me cry.

7

I've read all but four of those and also not 'Angela's Ashes'. Some I have read several times. Throw in a few by James Baldwin, Henry James, Leonard Cohen and Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was My valley' and one has guaranteed non-stop misery every reading month for a whole year at least. Blah!

8

Those are all a barrel of laughs compared to 'Angela's Ashes'. I started to read it, got so depressed I decided it wasn't worth my emotional well-being to finish it, so gave up.