What’s the saddest book you’ve read recently?

The book as a whole wasn’t sad, but there was one chapter in Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List which really got to me. Just hit a bit too close to home. A character, Robin (male) is describing his friendship with Robin (female) who wants to be more than friends. It is male Robin’s only chapter in the entire book, and it is written in a frantic stream-of-consciousness style. Here is where we get a bit personal. A few months ago I lost my yeah kind of a douchebag but still my best friend due to similar misunderstandings and this chapter just managed to really hit that nerve. Perhaps not universally sad, but definitely sad at the time that I read it.

“[...] I just want to do shit like talk to her and drink with her and sit and do homework with her, because when we do shit like that, it’s not nearly as boring as it is when I do it alone, because every now and then she’ll grunt or laugh and I’ll say, What? and she’ll come up with the most random shit, which totally makes me think she’s the greatest, only I don’t want to sleep with her. And Gerald, he was saying, Dude, you know there’s a word for that kind of relationship, and I was like, Please tell me what it is because this is killing me, and Gerald was smiling and taking a big drag before he said to me, Friendship, man–that shit’s called friendship.”

And just to make this post a little lighter, here’s a song I manage to get stuck in my head whenever anyone mentions crying, tears or hot boys from New Zealand – “Hurt Feelings” by Flight of the Conchords. They never fail to cheer me up when I’m down: