The Independent has a quirky feature by David Nicholls, a list of The Top Ten Literary Tear Jerkers. This is actually quite amusing, not quite what you’d expect from a list of this sort.
Here’s a sample:
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST BY KEN KESEY
I’ve not read this for twenty-five years now, so am quite prepared to be told that it’s nothing special. As a seventeen year-old, however, I thought this was a masterpiece of world literature. I was working in a coffee percolator factory at the time, reading this in my lunch breaks, and returning to the assembly line red-eyed and shaken after the death of McMurphy. You can imagine how complex and interesting my workmates thought I was after that.