Booking through Thursday – Romantic

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme in which we answer a question about books or reading.

This week’s meme is:

What’s the most romantic book you’ve ever read?
(Mind you, I don’t mean the hard-core stuff you hide in plain wrappers under your mattress. I mean True Love, Romance, deeply emotional, heart-tugging, and all that stuff.)
And, secondly, did you like it? Is it your usual kind of reading, or did it take you by surprise?

The Time Travelers’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger must be my first choice. After reading the prologue where Clare and Henry both have their say about their situation, I was hooked and in tears. Let me quote a bit and you’ll see why:

Claire: It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays. …….  Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Throught each moment I can see infinite moments lining up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel? ……. And Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning, sleepy and crumplefaced. Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading, with her hair hanging over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed. Clare’s low voice is in my ear often. I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

I loved it. Absolutely adored it, and still do.

It is my usual kind of reading in that it offers something supernatural, Henry’s inability to live chronologically like other people do. It was also an unusual choice for me as it said on the cover that this in some ways was an old fashioned love story. I usually don’t like romances that much, the book must have something else to offer, and this one certainly did.

I also have a few other honorable mentions on my romantic list.

• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith – one of the first novels where a lesbian couple gets a happyish ending.
  
• Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg – Idgie and Ruth were my favorites of course.
• The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey – Helva’s relationship with one of her human brawns is still with me years after I read this book.
  
• A Civil Campaign : a comedy of biology and manners by Lois McMaster Bujold – I love the whole Vorkosigan-saga, but I had the best time seeing Miles finally finding the right woman in Komarr (where he first meet her) and in this one where he sets about courting her, avidly watched by his friends and family.