Valentine’s Day 2012: Top Ten Most Romantic Books

We do, in general, moan and groan about the fact that no one really reads books... the old-fashioned way... any more.

The common complaint is that the romance of holding a sheaf of crinkly yellow pages... bound in musty leather... wreathed in a layer of dust that sprinkles itself, like magic powder, over the reader, transporting the individual with a few deft strokes of language, from Victorian England to the savage wilderness of an African safari... and from the dank and wretched confines of a slave ship in the Caribbean to the exquisite sensual elegance of a ball in medieval Italy... has died out, in this age of iPads and Kindle Fires.

Nothing as wonderful as the experience of a good book, however, ever goes, to quote Dylan Thomas, goes "gentle into the good night".

On the occasion of Valentine's Day allow us to introduce you to ten book whose essence speaks of love... whose soul lives only for romance... and whose pages and stories will make you cry.

Italo Calvino once said "the ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life and the inevitability of death". The Italian master was pointing out the comedy and tragedy inherent in life... and in love...

Who are we to disagree with him?

Start the slideshow to check out the ten most romantic books of all time...

Valentine's Day 2012: Top Ten Romantic Books

Book: Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Bronte
Year: 1847
Story: Today, when critics take up Emily Bronte’s masterpiece, much of the conversation centers of two pivotal points – the geographical setting for the story (the wild, untamed, harsh and oftentimes angry moors) and the character of the protagonist – Heathcliff. Indeed, so wonderfully are each of the two reflected in the other that sometimes you forget, just occasionally, about the romance and heartache in the plot. Wuthering Heights is not a straightforward love story…. In fact, it isn’t even really a love story. It is a mixture of romance and revenge and why it is special is because of the heart-rending intensity of each.

Book: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree; The Book of Saladin; The Stone Woman; The Sultan of Palermo; and Night of the Golden Butterfly (The Islam Quintet)
Author: Tariq Ali
Year: 1992, 1998, 2000, 2005 and 2010
Story: This could be construed as cheating… but we simply could not either break up this beautifully evocative quintet of books or select one at the expense of the other four. One of the more defining critical points of review of any book ought to concern itself with how well the author has encompassed the scale of his subjects’ time periods… how effortlessly he draws the reader into the intricacies of the social milieu… and how well he leads the reader from one room filled with rich and sensual tapestries to the dank, filthy and hellish dungeons of another era altogether, without ever pausing for breath or breaking the flow. The five novels in this series are not quintessentially romantic novels… in that they are not about a single man and a single woman or a love triangle. Instead, the romance is in the breadth and expanse of the stories. They chronicle the rise and fall and fluctuations of the Islamic empire in its long struggle with the Western civilizations. Together the novels form an epic panorama that begins in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain with “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree”, and closes in the twenty-first century cities of Lahore, London, Paris and Beijing with “Night of the Golden Butterfly”. Need we say more?

Book: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Year: 1873 - 1877
Story: Leo Tolstoy ought to be ranked (if he is not already) alongside the greatest names in the history of literature, from all languages. If there ever was an author and his stories whose epic scale of vision and thought transcended time and space, then this Russian genius is that man. “War and Peace” is one of the most impressive and stunning narratives of war-time fortunes ever seen… and “Anna Karenina” one of the most heart-breaking romances. It is a story of love and of passion… the title character is a woman whose romantic feelings for her lover are undercut by societal pressures and her own insecurities. The reason this is such a masterpiece is simply because there are few writers so adept at weaving the nuances of the societal mores and customs of the time into their characters’ lives… forcing them, and by extension us, to live, breathe, speak and die in, literally, the real world.

Book: Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Year: 1813
Story: Quite possibly one of the most romantic books ever written, “Pride and Prejudice” is the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. It is difficult to explain why this book and this alone, from Austen’s epoch-defining collection of period romances, is universally acclaimed, by critics, seasoned readers and novices. The best we can do is to explain there is something in the language… the characters… the locations… the story itself… some underlying rhythm that courses through the text. Each word seems to flow into another… each situation into the next. You’re not so much reading the book as you are actually living it. The best we can say is that at the end of the book, we guarantee you will see yourself either as a “Mr. Darcy” or as a “Lizzie”… and that, in itself, is perhaps the best compliment we can give.

Book: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Author: John Fowles
Year: 1969
Story: Fowles’ masterpiece is based on the 19th century romantic/gothic novel… a genre of literature that actually dates back to the 18th century… and this is the first most intriguing part of the book – the fact that Fowles’ actually wrote it late in the 20th century! This contrast in time periods – of the author and the book – is seen in the way the former suddenly intrudes on the book’s space (a Barthesian premise, in this case, would be that the book and the author occupy distinct intellectual spaces), through comments on social situations. The book itself is the story of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff. Charles' relationship with Ernestina Freeman creates another sort of romantic story, one that formed the basis of many Victorian novels.

Book: Jane Eyre
Author: Charlotte Bronte
Year: 1847
Story: Yes… yes… we have another Bronte on the list. It is, perhaps fortunately, a rarity that the world sees such literary brilliance manifest itself thrice in the same generation of a single family. The Bronte sisters – Emily, Charlotte and Anne (a poet but whose literary works include “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, a wonderful read in its own right) – have written and painted with an inimitable style. The realities of a hard life (their two elder sisters, Maria, 11, and Elizabeth, 10, died in 1825 of tuberculosis) and the harsh Yorkshire moors that were their home, coupled with incisive minds resulted in a series of novels, each better than the last. Jane Eyre is about a female protagonist that women from all walks of life have found profoundly moving for over a century… a heroine that must ultimately choose between her desire to be with the man she loves and the morals that form the core of her character.

Book: The Guide
Author: R. K. Narayan
Year: 1958
Story: Not perhaps a book you might think of when you’re asked to recollect the names of romantic novels… this R.K. Narayan masterpiece is nevertheless one of the finest pieces of Indian English Literature ever written. Narayan has that rarest of rare gifts – the ability to write prose as if he were telling a story around a fireplace… the ability to create to entire towns (Malgudi) with merely a few broad sketches and populate it with a host of eccentric and entirely lovable characters who then proceed to take it over completely, filling their lives and yours with all the little quirks that make South Indian society so memorably fun. This particular book has to do with an unemployed railway vagabond and his love affair with a classical dancer married to a rather reclusive archaeologist.

Book: Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
Year: 1936
Story: When discussing instances of English literary works that have reached epic proportions… you simply cannot leave Margaret Mitchell’s work out in the sun. The fiery, passionate and sweeping story of a young woman and her romance, the fate of her family and that of an entire country - all at the same time – is rivaled only by the depth of emotion hidden in each section. The fact that the book was made into a film that achieved cult status must also be mentioned, even if there are some who believe the former was indisputably better. Nevertheless, seeing Vivian Leigh and Rhett Butler spit barbs at each other and then fall hopelessly in love, often at the same time, only reiterates just how breathtaking this book is.

Book: The English Patient
Author: Michael Ondatjee
Year: 1992
Story: Haunting and beautiful, Ondaatje’s award-winning novel tells the story of four war-damaged souls living in an Italian monastery at the end of World War II and the love story between two of them - the exhausted nurse Hana and the severely burned and unnamed English patient. It is, without doubt, unforgettably unique. In addition, it is, perhaps, most interesting because unlike most other romantic novels, in “The English Patient” the past and the present are continually intertwined. The narrative structure intersperses descriptions of present action with thoughts and conversations that offer glimpses of past events and occurrences. Finally, although there is no single narrator, the story is alternatively seen from the point of view of each of the main characters.

Book: Love Story
Author: Erich Segal
Year: 1970
Story: Few books’ opening lines are so oft quoted and so held to the light as the most definitive introduction to a romantic novel. When Oliver Barrett IV "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And Brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me”, your heart melts. The book is perhaps not the best example of literature… the language is not exemplary, nor is the plot gripping… what it is, however, is the finest exposition of raw romantic sentimentality since Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.