Top 5 of the day

Here we go:

Top 5 books that made me cry.

I had the choices of ranking these chronologically or by tear jerker status...Hell, I'll do both.

I cried like a little girl...from sniffling to mourning.
1. Shock Wave - Clive Cussler
2. The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
3. Old Yeller - Fred Gipson
4. The five people you meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
5. Where the red fern grows - Wilson Rawls

Here are the books from when I was a lad to when I was 25.
1. Old Yeller - Fred Gipson
2. The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
3. Where the red fern grows - Wilson Rawls
4. Shock Wave - Clive Cussler
5. The five people you meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom


I think that Old Yeller is the classic 'made me cry' novel. I must have been about 6 years old when I first read the book. I don't remember where I was, but I do remember sobbing in disbelief that the puppy got shot. Seriously, who shoots a dog?

C.S. Lewis wrote my favorite series of books of all time, The Chronicles of Narnia. Every single book in that series affected me more as a child than any other piece of literature. The Last Battle is the final book in the series. The four children are told that they are too old for the Narnia. As a 25 year old man, no one is too old for the Narnia.

Flying from Saudi Arabia to Heathrow airport in England is a long, long airplane flight. Luckily I had prepared well and brought a sufficient supply of sugary snacks and some suitable reading material, 'Where the Red Fern Grows'. Two hours into a 12 hour flight I am sobbing like a little kid. Hell, I was 8, I was a little kid, but that's still no excuse for the hole I felt in my soul that was vacated by Little Ann and Old Dan. I have never found another book that made me feel so sorry for someone else.

While I'm a huge fan of adventure novels, I would dearly love to write them myself, I don't normally consider them to be tear jerkers. In fact, the jerking of tears should definitely not be an inherent part of any novel. Shock Wave, one of the many novels about the protagonist Dirk Pitt, was written late in the series, well after you've become invested in the main character. He's a James Bond type of character, never falling in love, so when he does, you really become interested in this girl. To spoil the book, she dies at the end of the novel and it hits you really hard.

Mitch Albom shouldn't be allowed to write another novel while I'm alive. I normally don't read 'sappy' feel good novels, but I made an exception when someone gifted this with me last summer. I stayed up late at night, by myself...originally alone while I started to leaf through it. 10 minutes later I was joined by a box of tissues as I started to actually cry while reading this book. I don't remember what was happening in my life during that time, but apparently I wasn't living a life of rainbows and puppies.