"Is that it? Are we done?"

I know I'm supposed to know what this comes from. I don't.

First book I remember crying while reading is A Lantern In Her Hand. And then Where the Red Fern Grows.

Gris, Angel. Doyle.

I remember as a kid, crying at the end of a book called Tom's Midnight Garden [link] But not because it was sad, just because i enjoyed it so much that I didn't want it to end.

Gris, Angel. Doyle.

Ah! Yes.

It was part of my tag once. I am ashamed.

More than Anne of Green Gables, I cried hard at the end of Pat and Emily series by LM Montgomery. I read the Pat series again when I was older and didn't love it as much, so I've stayed away from Emily of New Moon.

Books make me sad, but more often, they'll make me angry on behalf of a character, or a group.

But I'm a sucker for visuals and injustice, and HKF recently caught me sniffling over a Little House on The Prairie episode HKF was watching. What? It was sad that Mary didn't take the test after she nearly burned down the barn. See also, Ever After.

Don't feel bad, Gris. I couldn't immediately place it either.

Add me to those people who bawled at Where the Red Fern Grows and Charlotte's Web. I had the misfortune of deciding to read Where the Red Fern Grows on one of our family car trips across the country. I was in the back seat reading and sobbing. I went through a whole box of kleenex. My mom was so worried she made my dad pull over until I calmed down.

eta: Man, I just went to read a summary of WTRFG and now I'm sobbing like a baby AGAIN.

Sounder. Roots. Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. Lord of The Rings. Hunger Games. Game of Thrones.

The slave trade (specifically the transatlantic one) makes me cry like a baby. Racism in the South makes me cry. The bit where the little guys stand up to fight makes me bawl.

I picked up the June 13/20 issue of The New Yorker and read through it while I got the oil changed at Luscious Garage.

Review: Absolutely heartbreaking story by Aleksander Hemon about his infant daughter's brain tumor. Read only if you wanted to be torn asunder or need to clear your tear ducts.

However, it also had The Russian Professor an excerpt from Nabokov's letters about his lecture tour that he undertook in the fall of '42 because a teaching job at Wesleyen didn't materialize. While I was reading it I kept thinking, "This is such a Preston Sturges movie. I wonder if the Coen Brothers could film this."

Because Nabokov isn't going to Yale or Duke, his tour is: Croker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, Spelman College in Atlanta, GA (a traditionally black women's college), Georgia State Womans College in Valdosta, a stopover in Springfield, Illinois and Macalaster College in St. Paul, MN.

He's taking trains and buses and forever being driven off to some field by some dotty old female botany professor so he can collect butterflies and he keeps having weirdly picaresque coincidental meetings ("...after lunch a Presbyterian minister, Smyth, turned up, a passionate butterfly collector and son of the famous lepidopterologist Smyth, about whom I know a lot (he worked on sphingids)."

Then he's being paired off to play tennis with some random professional woman in Atlanta, or giving lectures to all the young women of Spelman after daily church services and being mildly cranky and inconvenienced by missed connections and nervous barbers.

It's all so dry, with gentle, affectionate snark and oddly fish-out-of-water, but has a melancholy undercurrent as he's longing to write in Russian again.

Wes Anderson could do this movie too.