We asked the staff members of the UT Chattanooga Library to suggest their favorite books about love and romance. Ask your campus librarians if they have these titles and check them out today!
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes (1977)
A structuralist meditation on love, in the
form of short entries, alphabetically arranged by topic. Dense with allusion and the trappings of theory, yet somehow still recognizable.
Shards of Honour, Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)
I read this book at least once a year. Military science fiction and romance, can’t get any better than that!
ZOO or Letters Not about Love, Victor Shklovsky (1923)
An epistolary novel. Exiled in Berlin, Shklovsky falls madly in love with a woman who allows him to send her letters on the sole condition that they not be about love. His constant correspondence covers topics ranging from art to philosophy to history, though his unrequited feelings are constantly bubbling under the surface.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino (1979)
A ground-breaking, self-referential, postmodern narrative. You are one of two book lovers who develop a relationship while on a quest to find the end of a book named If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, which is the story of you, one of two lovers who develop a relationship while on a quest…
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Really more a satire of the bourgeoisie Romantic-era conception of love. Also in the running for the greatest novel ever written.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (1936)
A modernist classic about the messy complexities of love and sexuality.
Nadja, Andre Breton (1928)
A foundational surrealist work that explores the tension we feel between our lover and the idea of our lover.
Ask the Dust, John Fante (1939)
A struggling writer in Depression-era Los Angeles falls for a waitress who is in love with someone else.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)
The classic love story, need I say more.
Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson (1998)
A look at love through the eyes of the ancient Greeks.
On Love: A Novel, Alain de Botton (2006)
A modern take on the highs, and lows, of love.
Love Is a Dog from Hell, Charles Bukowski (1977)
Probably not to everyone’s taste, why because it’s poems and Bukowski, but a favorite of mine.
Trysting, Emmanuelle Pagano (2016)
Scenes from hundreds of relationships, all genders, races, sexualities, first dates, divorces, and more.
For more information about these books and more, please contact Theresa Liedtka at the UTC Library.