The Girl with All the Gifts - M.R. Carey The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge - T.J. English

I read in public, so crying while reading is embarrassingly memorable for me. It actually happened to me twice of late, but since you've seen those reviews go through my feed, I figured I'd try to think of something else. The first book I thought of was Rilla of Ingleside, but I've already gotten that one. Then there's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but that one's covered as well. I'm really having trouble thinking of other examples, so I'm going to just go with the recent ones.

 

The first is Girl With All The Gifts. If you've read the book, you know exactly where I got choked up. I was at the gym and on an elliptical when my eyes teared up and I started having to take these long, strained breaths because of the lump in my throat.  This wasn't helped by the fact that I'd paired the book with James Newton Howard's Blood Diamond, which was just asking for trouble.

 

Review here, but if you've seen my feed, you've seen it before.

 

The second was rather more surprising. I didn't really have any trouble when I was reading The Savage City. I was angry, sure. Sad, definitely. But not crying.  Then I was talking to my mom on the phone, and started describing the book, telling her that she should use it in her history classes. I started trying to explain why it was so important--why never having been taught about George Whitmore in school, why never having been given a full picture of Malcom X, why never having been told about the racism and corruption in the "justice" system of the North--why all of it felt almost like a betrayal by a system I had never really thought that I believed in.

It is wrong that this story has been ignored, wrong that such a sickening injustice has been shifted aside. The sheer irony is painful: George Whitmore had an alibi for the murder he had been framed for: he had been watching, rapt, as Martin Luther King made his most famous speech.

One would think that the story was too perfect for the media to resist, but Whitmore's story really never gained traction. Even the television show that was to be based on his story was somehow morphed into Kojack--the adventures of a white man who acts as the hero and rescues a wrongfully-accused black man. The twisted irony of it all simply kills me.

I was trying to tell his story to my mom and that's when I started crying, not exactly out loud, but enough that I couldn't really talk.

 

I read this one pretty recently too. My review is here.