As witty as many find them, try and get the usual tired 'Twilight/the Bible made me feel sick/angry' responses out of the way quickly if you can't resist them.

I can think of plenty of books that I think are brilliant and that I've enjoyed but only a few that have really made me feel something. Pinpointing how and/or why is surprisingly difficult.

Which books have made you feel something? What exactly was that feeling, and why/how do you think the writer managed it?

Maybe you related to a character or it changed your perspective on something. Perhaps the actual storyline was incredibly thought-provoking or there were certain passages that just made you stop in your tracks.

I know I made a thread on favourite extracts/quotes from books a while ago, but that's for, well, favourites. If the last suggestion (about particular passages) rings true, would you mind quoting them and explaining what it was about them? Of course, trying to explain why/how a sentence or paragraph made you feel and doing it justice is far easier said than done.

I find that non-fiction affects me on an emotional level greater than fictitious stories.

This one's geeky and it's journal-esque but it's Charles Darwin's first edition of On The Origin of Species (before he changed some views amidst pressure from his imbecilic society) and it's astonishingly cohere even to this day. It was published in 1859.

I only got 'round to reading it last summer and it evoked a feeling of awe I've never really experienced before. I've been studying genetics and evolution since 6th form and into uni, but to have read this great man's enthusiastic account of being the first to discover natural selection was like experiencing with him the greatest "a-ha!" moment in the knowledge of life.

His very last paragraph starts with "there is grandeur in this view of life". This summed up my feelings throughout learning about evolution over the years, and how it completely changed my world perspective in a much more beautiful and coherent sense.

I want to fully quote the Origin's last paragraph because it's quite gorgeous:


http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/start_quote_rb.gif There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/end_quote_rb.gif

Great thread. I don't have time now to collect the quotes in English and describe what I love about those books (or fragments) but I'll be back in a few days with a very long post.

As for fictitious/non-fiction distinction, I love reading all kinds of books: literary, scientific or philosophical and each type moves me in a different way. But literary language gives me that extra high that is focus on language and construction, and analysing of usage of language and the structure of a piece of writing can be even more stimulating than just great scientific discourse (which is solely focused on substance). And I think it's also the best way to present different perspectives through characters, it doesn't really matter if they existed or not.
Intellectual/philosophical ideas can be as well delievered through literary (or semi-literary) language and probably this is why some modern philosophers used literary style to present their ideas (like Nietzsche, Sartre or Heidegger). Because they were aware how language is build-in in our thinking and how much use of the words or construction of the world in a fictional book, or the way how characters are constructed, can change the whole perspective of seeing and thinking.
Sorry, that was obviously off-topic.

I'll post one, not exactly a book but probably the most moving and thought-provoking play I've ever read.

Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blind (http://brownblind.blogspot.com/2007/02/here-is-draft-of-script-we-will-be.html) [1890]

It's very short, dialogues and language are simple but, depending on the reading, can have much meaning, and everything's is quite open to interpretation. It was very different in structure and form from everything else I had read before. The characters and setting are quite unusual:


Persons.
THE PRIEST.
THREE THAT WERE BORN BLIND.
THE OLDEST BLIND MAN.
THE FIFTH BLIND MAN.
THE SIXTH BLIND MAN.
THREE OLD BLIND WOMEN PRAYING.
THE OLDEST BLIND WOMAN.
A YOUNG BLIND WOMAN.
A MAD BLIND WOMAN.

THE SIGHTLESS

A very ancient northern forest, eternal of aspect, beneath a sky profoundly starred. – In the midst, and towards the depths of night, a very old priest is seated wrapped in a wide black cloak. His head and the upper part of his body, slightly thrown back and mortally still, are leaning against the bole of an oak tree, huge and cavernous. His face is fearfully pale and of an inalterable waxen lividity; his violet lips are parted. His eyes, dumb and fixed, no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity, and seem bleeding beneath a multitude of immemorial sorrows and of tears. His hair, of a most solemn white, falls in stiff and scanty locks upon a face more illumined and more weary than all else that surrounds it in the intent silence of the gloomy forest. His hands, extremely lean, are rigidly clasped on his lap. – To the right, six old blind men are seated upon stones, the stumps of trees, and dead leaves. – To the left, separated from them by an uprooted tree and fragments of rock, six women, blind also, are seated facing the old men. Three of them are praying and wailing in hollow voice and without pause. Another is extremely old. The fifth, in an attitude of mute insanity, holds on her knees a little child asleep. The sixth is strangely young, and her hair inundates her whole being. The women, as well as the old men, are clothed in ample garments, somber and uniform. Most of them sit waiting with their elbows on their knees and their faces between their hands; and all seem to have lost the habit of useless gesture, and no longer turn their heads at the stifled and restless noises of the island. Great funereal trees, yews, weeping willows, cypresses, enwrap them in their faithful shadows. Not far from the priest, a cluster of long and sickly daffodils blossoms in the night. It is extraordinarily dark in spite of the moonlight that here and there strives to dispel for a while the gloom of the foliage. In short, there are 12 blind persons, with no names, on an unknown island, sitting in a circle, wondering where they are, and waiting (and praying) for coming of the priest. But it's not going to happen, because, as we can see from the very beginning, the priest is lying dead among them. But they don't know it, since they are blind and cannot see it. But still believe he will come and take them to a better place. The priest symbolises God. I think the whole concept is just brilliant. I love how the author used blind characters to show how one's knowledge about the world can be limited, and how subjective everyone's perspective can be.

It's interesting and sad to observe reactions of people who are left alone in unknown world, who are used to having always some kind of guideline in form of religion or other kind of protector or authority that shows directions, which is now gone. And seeing them waiting in anxiety but still having hope when it's obvious for us (readers/viewers) that there's no hope. And then seeing their despair and fear when they found out the priest is dead, and the future is unknown.

And it's incredible how relevant it still is, if we relate it to the presence of God and religion in the minds of most of societies in our today's world, after so many decades after Darwin's theory of evolution. Or any other situation on a smaller scale when one's too afraid to look at the world as it is, or to get out of some kind of comfortable illusion. And there's also the question of why are we blind and remain so and whether it isn't because we ourselves prefer to stay in our comfort zone (human nature?) too afraid of the risk that change can bring, or waiting for someone to show the way for us.

My post is going to sound nerdy. Just a warning haha.

Fahrenheit 451 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451) had a real impact on me. After reading it, it was so easy to appreciate literature and books and freedom of speech. It just had this effect on me and it really got me into reading a lot more. And its actually what pushed me to study English and literature in university. Lame, I know.

As I Lay Dying was another one that had an impact on me. This one had more of an emotional effect, though. It was a lot about family - a dysfunctional family comes together in the time of death and they have to work together to fulfill the deceased person's wishes. For some reason, seeing the way the family came together from the beginning of the novel to the end was very profound for me. Maybe its because this family seems a lot like mine. I don't come from the strongest family, but when my grandmother died we all came together and were able to be there for each other. We all put our differences aside to get over this whole thing together.

These quotes are my favourite from the novel:

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up into the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

The quilt is drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands and her face outside. She is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candlesticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.

Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

[W]ords dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. . . . [M]otherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.

The thread is a great idea... :) ...There is really a difference btw. favourite books and those, which actually make you feel something...IMO it's not the same...And it's possible, that I'll come as a moron here, I still write down the title of the first book, which came to my mind...

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n17732.jpg



This love story, by the author of Birdy and Dad, is set in Paris in 1975. Jack, 49, and American, has walked out on his fast-lane corporate career and troubled marriage to return to his first love, painting. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris, struggling to express his long-suppressed feelings through his art.
While painting in the park (and blocking the sidewalk), an elderly blind woman walks into him, knocking him off his feet and getting herself smeared with paint. Mirabelle, 71, is small, elegant, and radiant. They fall slowly, carefully, and improbably in love, and into a tender physically passionate affair.
While Mirabelle's tremendous sense of life inspires Jack to paint with new vision and freedom, he shares with her the mysteries of passion, and frees her from the traumatic event that blinded her in childhood.



As the review say, it's a non-traditional love story...I say it's the most wonderful love story I've ever read...A special bond btw. two people, who are sooo different and still rescue each other...I can't bring some special quote...For me the whole book was special...Some can say I'm a perverse for loving this book...Now I just say: Look deeper, than the surface...

It's interesting and sad to observe reactions of people who are left alone in unknown world, who are used to having always some kind of guideline in form of religion or other kind of protector or authority that shows directions, which is now gone. And seeing them waiting in anxiety but still having hope when it's obvious for us (readers/viewers) that there's no hope. And then seeing their despair and fear when they found out the priest is dead, and the future is unknown.

And it's incredible how relevant it still is, if we relate it to the presence of God and religion in the minds of most of societies in our today's world, after so many decades after Darwin's theory of evolution. Or any other situation on a smaller scale when one's too afraid to look at the world as it is, or to get out of some kind of comfortable illusion. And there's also the question of why are we blind and remain so and whether it isn't because we ourselves prefer to stay in our comfort zone (human nature?) too afraid of the risk that change can bring, or waiting for someone to show the way for us.


Brilliant explanation, thank-you. I didn't guess the symbolism at all (which made me feel even dimmer when it was explained and seemed incredibly obvious).


I agree with your points on the use of literary language, how it can evoke just as much thought as the actual content.

I think that's what makes it so difficult for me to pick out exactly what it is that makes certain books have different effects. There are plenty which I can say have incredible plots or writing styles but those all make me feel, for the most part, awe for the author. There'll be amazing twists and turns in the storyline or the writer will phrase something beautifully but instead of delving into what's described, I'll think "God, I wish I wrote that." I suppose that respect for whoever wrote the prose is there anyway if what it is that makes you feel that strongly is what's been described or explained. But admiration for the writer seems to come a lot more easily than true emotion or thought provoked by the content itself. For example, using the part of the play Chihiro offered, the concept and symbolism has a large effect in terms of how impressed I feel with the writer's skill and ability to express such ideas. The actual content, the thought of people that vulnerable, is just as effective when it comes to sparking off some sort of feeling. Of course, the two interlink so much anyway; I'd find the content just as saddening and thought-provoking without understanding what it means, but knowing what it signifies adds to that.

-


It felt sort of inevitable that I'd mention Birdsong; I can't shut up about it and it is, undoubtedly, the most stirring book I've read. Similar to what I mentioned earlier, there is an instant respect for Sebastian Faulks as a writer, but it's the only book I can think of that triggers real feeling based off of what's been written first, and then acknowledgement of how good a writer (I believe) he is. I think that's what sets it apart from other books, to me at least.

Really thinking about, so much of what has an effect seems to be due to the fact it's set in WW1. The (attempted, almost futile, empathetic) understanding that's already there about the carnage and agony of that period acts as a sort of preset undertone that evokes feeling. What I mean is that I was already aware that it's a fraction of time I simply cannot get my head or heart around. Having it somewhat personalised with characters and (valid and well-researched) descriptions magnifies the feelings that any contextual knowledge has already brought.

Apologies in advance by the way; I know it seems I might as well have just typed up the whole book.


I explained this quote in the Atheism/Agnosticism thread.

"...seeing somebody lose their faith is one of the saddest things to me. Most...assume it's because of the fact they're losing their religion, and that isn't really the case. It's just the thought of somebody believing in something so central to them and then not understanding it suddenly."

Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him. His old reflex still persisting, he fell to his knees, but he did not pray. He stayed kneeling with his palms spread out on the ground, then lowered his head and covered it with his hands. Jack knew what had died in him.

Something about the way it says "what had died in him" too. The idea of that stability and security being pulled out from under his feet because he's witnessed something capable of doing that, and how unimaginable those experiences are. I can't explain it.

"He's gone for a bath," she said. "We've put him in colloidal saline for a day."
"Does he lie against the bath?" Stephen asked incredulously.
"No, he's in a canvas cradle."
"I see. I hope he'll die soon."

I think it's the "I hope he'll die soon"; the extent of physical suffering as well as mental consequences being so bad that the kindest thing to wish for is his death.

“I wonder what my father would say,” he said reflectively. “Of course they’re all “doing their bit”, as he put it.” Weir swallowed and licked his lips. “It’s just that his “bit” and mine seem so different.”

I can't even begin to imagine the frustration of knowing a parent would urge you participate in something like that. And how there'd be no choice but to carry on letting him think it was alright because he didn't know the reality of it and it was too much for Weir to be capable of explaining, and for his father to be capable of understanding.

His limbs lay dangled over the sides of the canvas. He lay motionless, trailing his raw skin. His infected lungs began to burble and froth with yellow liquid that choked his words of protest as they lowered him into the stone bath outside.

You know it's inevitable he'll die or that he will never be the same again, and it will most likely be explained in a trivialising letter that paints him out to be some sort of self-sacrificing hero. When he's a victim. And there is no dignity in his condition at all. Pity or anger, I'm not sure which. Probably both.

No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded.

Really, awe for how flawlessly something is worded.




Far beyond thought, the resolution came to him and he found his arms, still raised, begin to spread and open. Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother's killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other's shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.

"...weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives." The sheer futility and guilt and despair at what they've done and have become. Gah. I wish I could describe what that paragraph does to me more eloquently.


Stephen eventually turned his face up to Levi. 'Is it over?' he said in English.
'Yes,' said Levi, also in English. 'It is finished.'
Stephen looked down to the floor of the German trench. He could not grasp what had happened. Four years that had lasted so long it seemed that time had stopped. All the men he had seen killed, their bodies, their wounds. Michael Weir. His pale face emerging from his burrow underground. Byrne like a headless crow. The tens of thousands who had gone down with him that summer morning.

He did not know what to do. He did not know how to reclaim his life.

He felt his lower lip begin to tremble and the hot tears filling his eyes. He laid his head against Levi's chest and sobbed.

Again, not being able to imagine what it must have been like. "He did not know what to do. He did not know how to reclaim his life." Just the thought of going through something that you can never get over or escape. The way Faulks says "reclaim" too, how his own life, though he is alive, has been stripped from him. And then how what has taken so much of him is over yet his first reaction is not one of joy or relief, but complete and utter anguish at how he can never recover.

-

“What I’ve seen…I don’t want to live any more. That day you attacked. We watched you. Me and Shaw. The padre, that man, can’t remember his name. If you’d seen, you’d understand. Tore his cross off. My boy, gone. What a world we made for him. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad.”

1. The fact he doesn't say that he wants to die, but that he doesn't want to live anymore and the fact his experiences have done that to him.
2. "If you'd seen, you'd understand." It's directed towards a character but it feels like another reminder that it really was/is inconceivable.

I've given up constantly deleting and re-typing what I've typed for my third point. As if I didn't sound like enough of a sap with this post already, I know, but there's no other way for me to describe it without it dripping with corniness. I suppose there is good defence in how justifiable it is.

3. Undoubtedly, "I'm glad he's dead", but of the whole book, for me it was that paired with: "What a world we made for him". I'm fairly certain that the idea of a man who loves his son realising his child is better off dead because he himself has created a world so undeserving of him is one of the most heart-wrenching things I've ever come across. The bitterness in that one sentence as well.






Oh dear. That's this thread murdered forever, then.

For me it's "The Emigrants" by Vilhelm Moberg - it is a series of four novels following a group of Swedish immigrants to Minnesota around 1900. The story follows pretty much the characters' whole life spans (the books are epic), so you really form an emotional attachment to the characters.

The last couple of chapters in the final novel (The Last Letter Home) are all about the (very old) main character reminiscing about happier times in his youth (with the help of an old map of his home province), which takes you as the reader back to the experience of reading about the beginning of the characters' lives as well, if that makes sense. It almost feels as if you were the old person looking back on your life, and at the same time it rounds off all of the characters' lives as if you were saying "goodbye" to them. Not sure if that sounds completely ridiculous! But I was actually in floods of tears the first time I read the final chapter, so the author definitely succeeded in conveying emotions :)

It's difficult to find a quote as it is a whole chapter, but the main gist is probably in this quote:

The map of Ljuder during the years had become worn from frequent handling by the old emigrant. It was made of good paper, but he had fingered it so often and turned and opened it, that it was wrinkled and barely held together at the creases. That was why he handled it so carefully.

Here before him he had his whole home parish with well-marked borders, from Lake Laen in the north to Lake Loften in the south. Across this paper his index finger found the markings, followed the roads he had once walked, stopped at places he knew well, familiar names of farms and cottages. Here was the crossroads where he had danced in his youth, the grove where they had celebrated sunrise picnics, wastelands where he had hunted, lakes, rivers and brooks where he had fished. He followed lines and curves, he stopped at squares and triangles. There was so much to look for, so much to find. And at each place where his finger stopped his memories awakened: This was his childhood and youth.

http://www.swedishamericanmuseum.org/store/images/2Moberg4.jpg