Our Favorite Writers Recount the Most Romantic Things They’ve Ever Read
Helen Phillips, author of And Yet They Were Happy
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler Italo Calvino
Romance is so subjective; I know plenty of people who find this book emotionally frigid. True, the characters are more likely to read than to engage in intimacy; true, a bunch of labyrinthine narratives increasingly interrupt and devour the original storyline. But I think part of the reason I find it so romantic is because the romance sneaks up on you. It’s only on the last page of the book that it really claims itself as a story about love—and we get, rare postmodern treasure, a happily ever after ending for our bookish protagonists: “Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings.” I gave this book to my boyfriend-now-husband nine years ago.