The Saddest Book I've Ever Read

If you're looking for a sob fest, this is it.

This book was all over my booktok feed for a while and it definitely took me a while to warm up to the idea of reading it. After all, it was deemed “the saddest book ever written” and I needed to do some serious mental preparations before I even considered tackling it.

Besides the daunting reputation, it’s also a whopping 800 pages long. Although I’m no stranger to longer books, I’ve definitely been more on a 200-300 page novel binge for a while.

The book is none other than Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

Here are some of my favourite quotes:

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.”

I wrote a more detailed review of the book over on my blog! I’m now aiming to write at least a short review of every book I read on the blog. That was kind of the point of starting the Coffees with Angel blog anyways—to start sharing more of the things that interest me.

Have you read A Little Life or do you want to?