Awesome books that made me cry

Well, it's way too hot to do much just at the moment, so I've been doing a lot of reading. I just finished a fantastic book about a biologist and her owl, and it's inspired me to post on my favourite tear-jerking books.

It doesn't take much at all to get me going - if someone in a movie even looks like they might be thinking about crying, that's enough for me! So pretty well any book where someone dies will set me off. The absolute worst ones, though, are the ones where the main character is an animal.

So, starting at the top-left, and continuing around in an orderly, clock-wise fashion, here are my "you must read these but make sure you have tissues handy" recommendations:

• Wesley: The Story of a Remarkable Owl
• Spix's Macaw: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Bird
• Alex & Me
• Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog

I actually can't remember if Spix's Macaw made me cry - it's the exception to the group, in that it follows an entire species rather than one particular animal (although the coder in me wants to go "s/animal/instance"). The story of Spix's Macaw as a species though is so sad, that I'm pretty certain I wouldn't have been able to help crying.

I still haven't seen the movie of Marley & Me - after bawling my eyes out at the end of the book I think I need a year or two to recover before tackling that one. And as for Alex & Me - good lord, I read that on a plane, so I tried to keep it together, but you really can't! It doesn't just hit you in the end, there's a double whammy where you have to deal with Alex's loss at the start of the book and then again at the end!

Still, in the same way that having pets is so, so worth it despite the fact that we know it's going to be horrendously awful when we lose them, these books are definitely worth reading. Just, maybe not on the bus :D

And in a side node, I recently read Raymond E Feist's latest, At The Gates Of Darkness, and it was awesome. I think I may have gotten through the whole thing without crying at all, but it's only because I completely lost it when reading the previous novel - that's all I can say without spoilers.

Anyway, aside from shutting myself in one room with the air con cranked, I have one other tip for coping with this stupid heat. Stare at this photo for hours on end:

My gorgeous sister-in-law (I should say, one of my gorgeous sisters-in-law!) is in France at the moment, teaching English, and she just sent over some absolutely gorgeous photos of the snow. Gorgeous snow photos are enthralling enough at any time, but when it's 41 degrees outside and it hasn't rained in months, it reaches a whole new level. I don't really have a Bucket List as such, but if I did, one thing on it would be a White Christmas. Current thoughts are that Germany would be the best bet, but I also think it would be more fun to wait until we have a little munchkin to share our white Christmas with.

Oh, and I also have to decide what to read next. It's a toss-up between Mr Darcy: Vampyre and Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, but I think the former is going to win, thanks to PandPTour's Twitter feed - since they raised the idea of Richard Armitage as Mr Darcy in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, it occurs to me that he'd make a pretty good vampyre Darcy, too.