Books Guaranteed to Put a Frown On Your Face

This week's Top Ten Tuesday is Books Guaranteed to Put a Smile On Your Face. Somehow I just don't feel like making such list today. So I'm going to do the opposite - Books Guaranteed to Put a Frown On Your Face or what I originally titled, Sad book recommendation for happy people. These are also some of my favorite books. These books don't end well, that is, they are not happy ever after endings. If you read these and they make you cry, pretend I didn't recommend you these books.

Eight Books Guaranteed to Put a Frown On Your Face

01 | The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw > link
Sorrowful, surreal, charming, though the situation is dire and the ending is extremely sad.
Sadness Rating (5 being the most sad): 5
Favorite Quote: "She was being shut down, paralyzed, physical avenues cordoned off. Thank goodness, she thought, she had done what she had when she had. She had waded in the Ganges, felt downy snow fill her mouth in the Alps, breathed deep to get the last of the oxygen from the high altitude of mountains. Swum. She had once swum."

02 | Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon > link
A story that starts kind of sad and ended kind of sad but there are some bits of hope there too.
Sadness Rating: 4
Favorite Quote: "He thought of these years as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you could reach inside one last time, touch someone's hand one last time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one."

03 | Postcards from a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber > link
It's a dramedy of sorts. There may be some sadness involved that the reader may or may not be surprised by.
Sadness Rating: 3 and a half
Favorite Quote: "Because the happy moment was lasting all day long. It was an endless happy moment, an inexplicable thing I didn't trust - something so extraordinary and awesome that only a complicated, paranoid evil plot could balance out the universe."

04 | Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens > link
This is a little depressing in that there aren't that many things to be happy about there are some optimism here especially with the Amy Dorrit character. I may have been a little bit influenced by the mini-tv series with Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen as I still can clearly see these two actors in the roles of Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam. This ends with a happy ending, it's really not as depressing as I made it sounded.
Sadness Rating: 4 and a half
Favorite Quote: "At first in the chair before the gone-out fire, and then turned round wondering to see her, was the gentleman whom she sought. The brown, grave, gentleman, who smiled so pleasantly, who was so frank and considerate in his manner, and yet in whose earnestness there was something that reminded her of his mother, with the great difference that she was earnest in asperity and he in gentleness. Now he regarded her with that attentive and enquiring look before which Little Dorrit's eyes had always fallen, and before which they fell still."

05 | The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro > link
He had to sacrifice certain things and maybe it's sad in that regard but he's fulfilling his life's work and maybe there is joy in that.
Sadness Rating: 3
Favorite Quote: “I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

06 | The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman > link
It's a sad love story with a sad ending but not tragic or depressing but just slightly near it. I do sort of see this as a happy ending.
Sadness Rating: 3 and a half
Favorite Quote: “How could I tell the doctor what was wrong with me? I didn't understand it myself. I couldn't articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness. My fear was of the weather, the atmosphere, the very air. What good did safety tips do me now? Avoid water, metal objects, rooftops; stay off the telephone in a storm, don't think glass can protect you; even if a storm was 8 miles away, you're still not safe from a strike. Avoid life perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip. Stay away from it all.”

07 | The Book Thief by Markus Zusak > link
I don't usually like reading books about war or stories set during a war because there is guaranteed death and sadness but I almost loved this book and it was quite more enjoyable than I expected even though there's one character that I really wish didn't die.
Sadness Rating: 4
Favorite Quote: "I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race — that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

08 | Gathering the Water by Robert Edric > link
To describe this book I guess would be one man's way of dealing with sadness and tragic losses. There was one scene that talked about what someone would to do to conquer a tsunami and the person sent arrows against the waves which sounds silly but how would one conquer water that is coming at you, ready to destroy you when you have no other resources other than an army of people with arrows?
Sadness Rating: 5
Favorite Quote: "Starting anew, I began to discern the light and the landmarks of the possible future. There was a time in between, of course — a period of confusion in which life went on and I acted out my part within it — but it was never starting anew, never a rebirth, merely a succession of lesser endings, during which I severed my ties one after another — my family, my work, my connection to Helen's family, to her sister, to my colleagues, and finally upon reaching the shapeless centre of that darkness, my hopes and expectations for the future."

What sad books would you recommend or do you prefer books that are happy and optimistic?

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