Witty Little Knitter

(No Day 10 because I couldn't remember a literary picnic) 

I have cried over a couple of books but often it's a general mood-thing. There are books I cried over the first time I read them but not the second time (or the other way round) but those are books I have read several times and always got teary-eyed at the same page.

Theo's Odyssey is a story about a boy who has leukaemia but over the course of the book he actually gets better till suddenly the test-results say it's getting worse again. The desperation he and his family feel is so real at this moment that I just cry everytime I come to that part...even though the 2nd and 3rd time round I knew the author pulled the somewhat cheap stunt of 'the doctors just mixed up his results with those of somebody else' but it changed nothing.

I'm Off Then is a book by Hape Kerkeling (a German comedian who is, among other things, really famous for dressing up as Queen Beatrix once and fooling a surprising number of people with it) about his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostila and it actually has two places that make me cry. One is when he talks about meeting a woman who is doing the pilgrimage for her daughter who died of cancer. The daughter had always intended to do it herself but in the end could not do it anymore. At the time I was reading the book the first time something similar had happened among my friends so I guess that's why it hit me so hard.

The other part is, somewhat oddly, his description of arriving in Santiago and his realization that this meant the end of his pilgrimage and everything connected with it. This came somewhat surprising (I think for him as well as for the reader) and he did manage to put it in really moving words and it really overwhelmed me.