‘Frankly ... I don't give a damn’ (Top Ten Romance Books)

Member Name: merv

Product:	Top Ten Romance Books
Date:	17/02/02 (798 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent reading material, A wide choice of styles , Classics

Disadvantages: I'd prefer a good detective novel

Just the nine I’m afraid, but quite frankly I don’t give a damn.

I’m not really into romantic fiction, or at least I didn’t think I was until I read the results of a recent poll and surprised myself over how many I’d read and actually enjoyed.

Most of them are, surprisingly enough, what you’d call ‘classics’ which either means nobody writes decent romances these days or I read in them in my impressionable youth when I was full of angst and had the ability to concentrate on something more taxing than the latest Dick Francis. Anyway, see what you think and if you can come up with something I could read and enjoy to complete the essential 10.


9. A room with a View by E.M Forster

Written in 1908, this social comedy based in Edwardian times, explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pension and in a corner of Surrey. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a George Emerson when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. She is attracted to him, but he is entirely unsuitable, as apart from anything else, his father appears to be a Socialist and Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and has to make a decision that will decide the course of her future - forced to choose between convention and passion. This is a really enjoyable story, full of romantic intrigue and colourful characters that includes outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Well I thought it was romantic.

8. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

I read all of Hardy’s books when I was doing A levels – in the days when most people were pleased if they got a C or a D grade. The bewitching Bathsheba Everdene came to Weatherbury to take up her inheritance, the
largest farm in the village. Her presence drew three suitors: the local farmer Boldwood, the shepherd Gabriel Oak and Sergeant Troy, the dashing soldier-seducer who declares, "All romances end in marriage".

Probably my favourite Thomas Hardy novel, it has tragic love, unhappy marriages, lust, death, murder, estrangement and so much more. Unlike most of Hardy's other novels, this one has a happy ending, with Bathsheba making a decision between mind-blowing passion and the ‘sensible option’.

7. A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute

My wife’s a great Neville Shute fan, and this is one of his best. A wartime romance which is a real teerjerker. English rose Jean Paget and Australian prisoner of war Joe Harmon, first meet on a death march in occupied Malaya. Jean believes Joe has been killed and he believes she has married. After the war they decide to search for each other, with Jean traveling to Australia while Joe flies to London. I remember going to see the film which I thought really captured the romance of the book.

6. Rebecca By Daphne Du Maurier

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." These evocative words begin this famous novel set against the wild Cornish coast. A young girl's life as a companion to an old lady is drastically changed when she plunges into a swift courtship and marriage to Maxim de Winter. After a short honeymoon, the newlyweds come home to Manderley where, the new Mrs. de Winter suddenly finds herself in charge of a gigantic house with many servants and learns about the tragic drowning of Rebecca, Maxim's first wife. She feels the presence of Rebecca everywhere in the rooms, in the daily routine and in the comments of the other characters. She also has a hard time dealing with Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, who hates her and delights in humiliating her.

An excellent plot with many mysteries and a climatic ending - the best Gothic r
omance of the 20th century.

5. The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

I used to be a member of one of those book clubs, which sent you beautifully hand crafted hard-back covers with the text printed on paper marginally better than cheap toilet paper. Looked great in the backlit mahogany book case, but try to read them and it was a race against time to see whether you could read them before the paper disintegrated.

Nevertheless, it introduced me to the Great Gatsby for which I will always be in their debt. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, this simple but extraordinary novel captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology.

Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of his country's most abiding obsessions - money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. His rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan.

Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, she marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from where Daisy lives, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama. A really satisfying romantic book which is very well written.


4. Wuthering Heights

I’ve put this in because of the film rather than the book, Ca
thy and Heathcliffe in a passionate clinch on a windswept moor is a classic image which most people would choose if you asked them to select a romantic scene from literature. If my memory serves me well, the book was a lot more cynical and disturbing than that with ambiguous overtones of sibling incest. Very gothic, very realistic and romantic with a capital ‘R’.


3. Jayne Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre is a real classic, a story of a plain and ordinary heroine who lives in a home with her aunt, and her cousins, none of whom like having her there. Jane is sent to school where she spends much of her time studying, followed by a couple of years teaching. When she ventures to become a governess for a young French girl, left in the care of the Mr. Rochester, the hero, she falls in love with him, but their love has many complications. Jane Eyre is a wonderfully complex and engaging character, who never quite fits into the easily assignable categories or behaves in the way we expect. The description of her gradual falling-in-love with Rochester is exquisite and painfully authentic. This book has everything essential to romantic writing and, in keeping with the times, a satisfactory ending.

2. Love in the Time of Cholera – Garcia Marquez

My son told me about this one, he’d read it as a set book in school and was amazed how good it was, so I gave it a try and thoroughly enjoyed it. Set in the civil war-racked aftermath of the liberation of South America from the Spanish, the novel charts the career of an unrequited lover Florentino Ariza, whose personal history is intertwined with the fortunes of the riverboats. He has loved Fermina Daza for 50 years and. when her husband dies, his chance for happiness comes.

This is a story of unrequited love, which most people who read it will sympathise with. An excellent book and a really good read, which admirably shows the power and magnificence of Garcia
Marquez's writing.


1. Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell

Without doubt, the greatest love story of our times. Margaret Mitchell’s monumental epic, about two of literature’s strongest and most well known characters - Scarlett O'Hara, and Rhett Butler is a compelling and entertaining novel, the sweeping story of tangled passions and the rare courage of a group of people in Atlanta during the time of Civil War. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular movie of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written selling nearly 30 million copies in more than 37 countries. Its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and arguably the most popular work by an American writer.

There you are then, nine romantic novels from someone who prefers Travel writing and Detective stories. Any suggestions for number ten?

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