TandeWrites

Every now and then, I have the urge to reread an old favourite book so I can relive some of the joy I felt reading it, but something stops me, and that’s the fact that the book in question caused me such a specific breed of emotional damage that I cannot even look at the book without feeling some kind of pain.

This list is in no particular order, just vaguely based on how much I mean it when I say I can never read them again. Let’s begin!

The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum

I was debating for a while over which K. Ancrum book would appear on my list, because most of them caused enough impactful emotional damage while reading that I thought I would never be ready to pick them up again, no matter how much I enjoyed them. But there is one book of hers which I cried reading, and I tear up if I spent too long thinking about specific quotes, and it’s a book I now hold so dearly to my heart that I would give anything to write something that makes someone else feel like I did back then. That book is The Weight of the Stars, and I have finally accepted that this must be my current favourite Ancrum read. It’s a tentative romance about girls and stars and friendship and regret, and it’s one of the gentlest books I’ve ever read.

The Weight of the Stars is about Ryann, a girl who lives in a trailer park on the wrong side of town who dreams of travelling across the stars, and Alexandra, a furious loner whose mother is an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to the edge of the solar system. Every night without fail, Alexandria waits to catch radio signals from her mother. And it’s up to Ryann to lift her onto the roof day after day until the silence between them grows into friendship, and eventually something more.

Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz

Rudy’s life is flipped upside down after his family moves to a remote island where there’s magical fish that can cure serious illnesses, hoping to cure his younger brother’s cystic fibrosis. As the only teenager on the island and nothing to do but worry, Rudy is bored and lonely until he meets and starts a tentative friendship with Teeth, the ugliest half-human half-fish (not quite a merman) that he has ever seen. Rudy can’t remember the last time he felt so connected to someone, and he’s questioning what he knows about everything, but being friends with Teeth is more than a little complicated and he learns secrets that will force him to choose between his own happiness and his brother’s life.

I wish I could explain clearly why this book means so much to me, but I can’t, other than it was the right book coming into my hands at the right time. Rudy and Teeth’s relationship is completely flawed and dysfunctional, but the characters are so beautifully written that I was in love with their complexity and desperation and charm. There were moments where I was having doubts about the story—was it too dark, too sad, too depressing—but then Rudy and Teeth stole my heart, and I didn’t need to suspend my disbelief in Moskowitz’s ability to make me believe in this reluctant relationship between a boy and fish-boy for a moment, and this book immediately made its way onto every favourites list I have made since.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Susie Salmon was murdered on December 6^th, 1973. She’s adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she’s watching life on earth continue without her—her friends trading rumours about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unravelling.

This is a book that I don’t remember reading, but I think I was either not emotionally ready to handle it at whatever age I was when I read it, or it simply fell into my hands at the wrong time, but I believe it was definitely eye-opening to me reading about such unspeakable loss and tragedy, especially as Susie would’ve been similar to my age. You’re given a front row seat to her unsolved case and the grief of her family searching for understanding.

Reflecting on this book at least ten years after I first read it, I think that, in addition to emotional pain, the reason I won’t be returning to this story is due to the sheer volume of Goodreads reviews with poor ratings.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

This is a book that I first picked up because of its comparisons to A Little Life in the sense that this is a story about suffering and dangerous loves, and queerness. This didn’t emotionally wreck me like A Little Life did, which left me feeling completely numb. This story left me feeling angry and provoked instead. I enjoyed the structure of the book and how well Douglas navigates between two timeframes – a backstory woven amongst a present in the loch – and how they come together for a final chapter that is nothing less than devastating, but with a hint of hope. I am not ashamed to admit that I was on the verge of tears for many of the later chapters. This is undoubtedly a very raw story, one that is equal parts captivating and horrific, but I think it will take a certain reader to see that kind of brutal honesty and value it.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they fall in love and dream of finding somewhere they belong. Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men with murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The bookish side of the internet’s number one nemesis.

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and held afloat only by their friendship and ambition. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

A Little Life is an incredibly polarising book for very good reasons. The authors intentions—as stated by the author herself in interviews—are questionable at best. The content in this book is graphic, constant, and deeply upsetting, veering a little too far towards voyeurism and far from truth-telling which doesn’t work for many reasons due to the subject matter. I was horrified and enthralled and filled with dread every time I turned the page. But the writing is many places is so gorgeous I couldn’t look away. And there is one quote about friendship tucked in amongst all that trauma which encapsulated my feelings at the time so perfectly that there will always be something drawing me towards this book.

And those are the books that caused me so much emotional pain that I can never read them again. I am positive that there are more books that made me feel this way, but they’re either not coming to mind right now or they’ve hurt me so much that I’ve forgotten them forever, so these are the key players right now.