Romance reading list

This list is not intended as a comprehensive canon, but as a thematic selection of works I recommend exploring.

Love, Memory, and Time:

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being– Milan Kundera

• Persuasion – Jane Austen 

• Orlando — Virginia Woolf

• Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin

• 1Q84 — Haruki Murakami (longer commitment)

• Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous— Ocean Vuong
  

Passion, Obsession, Destruction:

• Boredom – Alberto Moravia

• The Sorrows of Young Werther– Goethe

• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

• Dom Casmurro – Machado de Assis

• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  

Marriage, Fidelity, and Domestic Power:

• Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence

• Changes: A Love Story — Ama Ata Aidoo

• Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  

Love Against the Social Order:

• If Beale Street Could Talk– James Baldwin

• Kiss of the Spider Woman — Manuel Puig

• The God of Small Things— Arundhati Roy

• Love in a Fallen City— Eileen Chang

• Their Eyes Were Watching God— Zora Neale Hurston
  

Erotic Vitality and Awakening:

• The Color Purple— Alice Walker

• The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter

• The Awakening – Kate Chopin

• Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon – Jorge Amado

Sacred, Mystical Love, & Metaphysical Eros:

• Rumi’s Poetry

• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake

• Song of Songs 
  

Philosophical:

• Symposium – Plato

• “Uses of the Erotic” – Audre Lorde

• Eros the Bittersweet – AnneCarson

• Eroticism: Death & Sensuality – Georges Bataille

Foundational:

• Sappho’s fragments

• Ars Amatoria– Ovid

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets

• The Tale of Genji— Murasaki Shikibu

Some Personal Favorites:

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being– Milan Kundera

• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

• Their Eyes Were Watching God— Zora Neale Hurston

• Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon – Jorge Amado