A Good Cry

When people ask for a book recommendation, I always start with the same question: How do you want to feel?  Are you looking for something that will make you laugh? Cry? Be scared? Learn? 

For me, that answer is never "cry". I liked to be moved by a book, but I rarely seek out a book hoping to cry, though I know a lot of my student do. I often hear "I want a sad book", but that is never my thought. 

When I read the Kite Runner years ago, I recall crying so deeply that I had to set aside the book for a bit.  I was a mess.  After I finished it, it was days before I could read anything else, and even months later, though of the haunting sadness and devastation came back to me. These were in ways that made me think about larger issues, not just the suffering of individual characters, but the sorrow lingered.  

The Kite Runner is a beautiful book, and I do not regret reading it at all. But I  rarely go looking for a cry. 

That's the great thing about serendipity: that

time you randomly pick up a book you know nothing about and it ends up changing your life.  That has happened many times for me.  American Gods was that way.  When it was written, Neil Gaiman was less well known than he now is.  Wth the TV show based on the books reviving his fame, I have many times thought of how odd it was that I picked up American Gods, not really something I would typically read, and was blown away. 

Serendipity is beautiful, 

But it takes a measure of trust.  Trust in the process. And trust in ourselves. 

And I know my limits. I can't read books where kids have cancer (Sorry, John Green).  If I realize that's what I am reading, I will actually set a book aside. I know my limits. I have previously mentioned my issues with Challenger Deep. I wanted to finish it, but couldn't. 

Which makes it odd to me that I recently read

(in one day, staying up far too late) A List of Cages. 

I wept through that like a baby. 

But I kept going. 

And I am glad I did. With a warning of a mildly spoiler-ish nature, one of the characters has had a difficult life.  And faces struggles that are unimaginable during the course of the book. 

There is also something beautiful and triumphant about seeing someone deal with difficulties, find personal strength, find allies and such. 

But this is a hard book to read. Not difficult in terms of Lexile level, but hard. Heartbreakingly, rips-your-guts-out hard.  The suffering of others is difficult. And some is downright unbearable. For me, the thing, I think, that made this so difficult, is that it was so real, so possible. And so devastating in its possibility. 

So I kept reading it, and I am glad I did.  

My eyes hurt. My heart hurt. My soul hurt. But I am glad I read it. 

I didn't want to cry, rarely do, and certainly wasn't looking to. But I guess that is the great thing about books. It isn't just living vicariously through others, but really grasping the difficulties of others, that humanizes us.  It softens our heart to know man's inhumanity toward man and seeing that each of us has the possibility of being a balm to another facing that inhumanity. 

I suppose, whether we know it or not, sometimes we can all use a good cry.