I recently came across essayist Stephen Akey's "Lonely Teardrops" in the online magazine The Smart Set. The gist of the article is that while it's fine to analyze literature, it's also okay to let your emotions get the better of you as you read. (My one sentence summary does not do justice to the essay, so you should really read it for yourself).

Inspired by Mr. Akey, I've compiled my own list of "weepy" books. In the spirit of the piece, I've tried to limit myself to more literary works (or as my grandmother used to call it, "fancy-pants reading").

The first book that came to mind is James Agee's A Death In The Family. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. The novel (unfinished and published posthumously) is about his family's reaction to that death. Knowing that Agee basically drank and smoked himself to an early grave (at the age of 45), it is evident from reading this wrenching book that he clearly never got over the loss of his father.

Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection is another wrenching book that is about a nobleman's attempt to help a maid who was fired after he had an affair with her. He follows her to Siberia after she is imprisoned (for prostitution) and there he bears witness to the horrific conditions that the prisoners are subjected to.

I've always thought of Julian Barnes as being a dry, witty, detached writer. So when I read his Levels of Life, I was totally unprepared for the depth of emotion that he conveys in this mediation on grief and mourning after the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh. The fact that it took him five years to write the book only underlines how profound the loss of a loved one can be.

Joan Didion's Blue Nights was her second "grief memoir." The first, The Year of Magical Thinking, was about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In Blue Nights, she writes of the life and death of her adopted daughter Quantana Roo. Although Didion's clipped sentences give the book an air of detachment, her sorrow is clearly evident.

Francisco Goldman examines the death of his wife Aura Estrada, in a somewhat different way. Rather than write a grief memoir, he wrote Say Her Name, a "nonfiction novel" that is essentially true with some of the participants' names changed. While celebrating their second wedding anniversary in Mexico, Aura died in a body-surfing accident. Interweaving stories about both of their lives with excerpts from her writings, Goldman's story slowly gathers steam until the excruciating end, when he describes the accident in detail.

Although it's not a "fancy-pants read", I couldn't not include a book about the death of a dog (something that I am particularly susceptible to when it comes to weeping). Laika by Nick Abadzis is a graphic literature version of the story of Laika, earth's first space traveler, and also—tragically—the first casuality of space travel. The fact that Laika was a dog (and thus innocent) who was put in a space capsule by a group of scientists who knew they were sending her to a certain death makes this a tragedy off-the-charts. Abadzis's graphic adaptation only intensifies the horror.

Finally, if you're jonesing for a quick crying jag and you just can't wait, here is a poem by John Updike that is almost guaranteed to make you cry. The title tells you everything you need to know:

Dog’s Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

Read the rest in John Updike's Collected Poems, 1953-1993. Bring a tissue.