Friday Mood Recs: What's your favorite love story?

Love stories for Valentine's Day? Groundbreaking.

I love a good love story. I’m not sure I would have said that about myself before this year. I dabble in romance novels and the occasionally toxic love story, but the kind of love stories that seem to take off in the world of social media are not the ones I gravitate towards. But I had an entire section of Epic Love Stories in this year’s Mood Reader’s Almanac! It was my recent encounters with those books that helped me realize that the love stories I most enjoy are the ones that unfold over a long time span and a hefty number of pages. Today, I’m hoping we can build an epic list of epic love stories together.

My favorite love story is Possession by A.S. Byatt. I’ve referred to this book as a literary mystery in both senses of the word: it’s a literary novel that also happens to be a mystery, and the mystery is about literature. The same could be said about it’s label as a literary love story: it’s a literary novel that also happens to be a love story, and one of the love stories is a love affair with literature. The novel follows two scholars who have unearthed a previously unknown connection between two Victorian poets. Byatt gives the novel the subtitle “a romance” so we know to pay attention to the budding attraction between the scholars, but the passion and the all-consuming sense of ownership they feel for the poetry they study is just as compelling. This is a book I’ve reread a couple of times, and I think I might pick it up again at some point this year.