In your opinion, which are the best romance novels? Not just in terms of being a good read as a book, but also in terms of being true to life, especially emotionally. Do not limit yourself to just to genre romance (pictured above) but any sort of book, even poetry, biography or history. I want to read something good, not something trash or tedious.
Please let me know what you think in the comments below – or email me (abagond at gmail).
Thank you!
– Abagond, 2018.
See also:
- books
- The Top Ten Desert Island Books – lists the top 20
The ones with the big swords!
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I read in a bunch of languages, and not everything I read has been translated into English, but here are what I would recommend
Click to access milarepa_100000-songs.pdf
http://www.mptmagazine.com/author/philippe-jaccottet-2392/
Frans Eemil Sillanpää and his first novel, Elämä ja aurinko (1916; “Life and the Sun”)
http://www.harukimurakami.com/book/men-without-women
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/andres-caicedo/64763/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita
https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/writers/-aidas-marcenas
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uh….
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I have not read any romance novels lately. I used to the like historical ones. My favorite authors were Kathleen Woodiwiss; Bertrice Small; and Jude Devereaux. Never heard of Beverly Jenkins. But I am easily persuaded by a book cover. So I just might read some of her books.
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those guys would read those on the block in county, i liked the cheesy drug gang novels, other than that, i was looking for the game of thrones, got through 1-5 last time!!!
@abagond boggle
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My favorite romance in written fiction is Mimi’s relationship with her boyfriend in the Blue Bloods series by Melissa De La Cruz. Mimi is also my favorite character in written fiction.
Other books I recommend are Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (a mystery novel in the post-apocalyptic Midwest) and The Diviners by Libba Bray (a supernatural mystery in 1920s New York).
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I also recommend the Animorphs series by K. A. Applegate (is it a complex story about war, ethics, and confronting the Other disguised as a silly kids’ series, or is it a goofy comedy-of-aliens disguised as military sci fi?).
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I have been at a loss to suggest anything until your most recent post about Cleopatra made me think that you might enjoy historical romances.
There are several novels at this link that are about Cleopatra, her daughter, and other Egyptians:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/adkwriter15.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/top-ten-tuesday-top-ten-historical-fiction-books/amp/
On the other hand, if you are looking for something with a happy ending, Cleopatra isn’t going to be the best choice.
There is a whole genre of historical romances. Some are just bodice-rippers, others are well-researched and well-written. I don’t know a lot about the genre other than it exists, it is mostly biased towards Europe but not entirely, and that it could be worth investigating.
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The Red Tent by Anita Diamant had some romantic scenes. I thought it was a good book overall. I mostly like to read nonfiction, but I also sometimes like historical fiction or novels about people from faraway places (both of which describe The Red Tent).
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The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
James Meek, raised in Dundee, was for a number of years a foreign correspondent in Moscow and more recently covered the Iraq war and Guantánamo Bay. In his third novel, he shows a prodigious talent for describing a chapter in the horrific warfare of a century ago. One of his aims is to show how men having to struggle for their lives far from home also have to struggle to keep evil at bay.
The setting is Siberia 1919, with the Red Army in the ascendant on the eastern front of the post-Revolution civil war in Russia. Caught between the Reds and defeated Whites is the Czech Legion, a battalion of crack fighters who, stranded by the end of the First World War, have fought on the White side but now long to return. Quite what happened in fact will probably never be clear, but it is generally agreed that the Czechs secured a safe passage to Vladivostok by doing a deal with the Communist side and betraying the Whites [Tsarist Whites as opposed to the Reds, not the race 🙂 – RN].
Meek shows a possible version of this story in miniature: a few days in the life of a Siberian village where the Czechs are reluctantly in charge and the Red Army poised to attack. The foreign soldiers dream of returning to Prague, while their crazed commander, Matula, insists on staying put. Into this fraught military situation Meek weaves three love stories and a disturbing portrait of shamanism, which amounts to village spirit-worship. The love stories are, equally disturbingly, complicated by the influence of a sect of Christian castrates once famous in Siberia.
The novel opens with a series of brutal deeds to which we slowly attach the names of victims and perpetrators. The action and deeper characterisation that make reading this novel a pleasure only really unfold in the last hundred pages. But for readers fascinated by the setting, Meek provides an extraordinarily detailed picture. The sex is modest, perhaps too much so, but the butchery is not.
In the end the character who gives a moral narrative lead is the good Czech Jew, Mutz. He loves the beautiful Anna Petrovna, a woman hungry for the stimulation her castrate husband can no longer provide. But the man she beds is Samarin, a terrorist on the run from Tsarist days whose capacity to split his personality has reached proportions of Dostoyevskian horror.
One has to admire a British writer who can write convincingly as a Russian. There were linguistically odd moments when I thought I was reading a less than perfect translation (“Did you make these photographs yourself?”; “Go on, take possession of the unfortunate”), and presumably that effect was deliberate. What I missed was enough of the infectiousness that Tolstoy said was essential to art. I needed to feel with Meek’s characters. In fact, the creatures I worried about were the horses, revered by the shamans and the castrate Balashov, but forced to die horribly in battle. A kind of equine idealism shimmers over the whole novel, suggesting a dimension of existence finer than anything available in cruel human reality.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-peoples-act-of-love-by-james-meek-297538.html
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Take it from me, stick to the bodice rippers for sheer entertainment. The men are well over six feet tall and carry big swords and lances!
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