If we can take something positive from spending so much time in our homes, it is that reading time has skyrocketed among Spaniards. In this sense, the ‘Rakuten Kobo 2020’ report, by Kobo by Fnac, revealed at the end of 2020 that the most read categories followed the trend of previous years (fiction, non-fiction, romantic novel, mystery and thriller and children), although the genres that grew the most during that year showed the way in which the Spaniards invested their greatest availability of time: in personal improvement (+98%) and hobbies or ‘hobbies’ (+81%).
For lovers of reading and, more specifically, of romantic novels, here are 10 great works of love that every literature lover should have on their shelves:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
“Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813 after the success of Judgment and Sentiment, exemplarily brings together its recurring themes and inimitable vision in the story of the five daughters of Mrs. Bennett, who have no other goal in life than to achieve a good wedding for all of them.In its pages, the oppressive environment of the family, the pressure of marriage, the difference between classes, the ghost of poverty and the delicate sensitivity of a determined heroine, but not free from errors of judgment and doubts behavior, come together to create a masterpiece read over more than two centuries”.
Blood Wedding, by Federico García Lorca
Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca is one of the masterpieces of poetry and drama in Spanish. It is a tragedy written in verse and prose and published in 1931. “The theme of this work arose as a result of a news item that appeared in the press: two lovers elope on the eve of the woman’s wedding to another man. And from Hence, García Lorca turns reality into poetry combining in his work there is a desire for freedom, Andalusianism, symbolism and death, but above all, dramatic poetry.Blood Weddings is a play where the torn passions of its protagonists are unleashed before the attentive gaze of the moon, beautiful and terrible personification of death”.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. Regarded as a classic of English literature, the epic tale of Catherine and Heathcliff, set in the bleak and desolate Yorkshire moors, is an astonishing metaphysical vision of fate, obsession, passion and revenge. “.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell’s work is one of the best-selling books in history, a classic of United States literature that, together with its film adaptation, is one of the greatest icons of universal culture. “The play is set in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. Scarlett O’Hara lives on Tara, a large plantation in the southern state of Georgia, and is in love with Ashley Wilkes, who is soon to marry Melanie Hamilton. Butler likes Scarlett, but Scarlett is still in love with Ashley, who has just made public his engagement to Melanie.Saddened, Scarlett accepts the marriage proposal of Charles, Melanie’s brother, whom she despises.Years later, and as a consequence after the end of the war, already a widow, Scarlett must face new situations such as hunger, pain and loss and settle in Atlanta, where Melanie waits for news and Ashley and Butler appears again”.
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
“García Márquez traces the story of a love that has not been reciprocated for half a century. Although it never seems to be properly contained, love flows through the novel in a thousand ways: joyous, melancholy, enriching, always surprising. The love story between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, on the stage of a small Caribbean port town and over more than sixty years, it could seem like a melodrama of disgruntled lovers who ultimately win by the grace of time and the strength of their own feelings, since that García Márquez is pleased to use the most classic resources of traditional soap operas.But this time -for once successive, and not circular-, this setting and these characters are like a tropical mixture of plants and clay that the master’s hand molds and with which he fantasizes at his pleasure, to finally end up in the territories of myth and legend.”.
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
As the back cover of the work says, Yuri Andreyevich could never forget the first time he saw Larisa Feodorovna in that decadent hotel room. There, plunged into darkness, the young Zhivago felt devastated by the unknown force that oppressed his heart. The vision of that tormented young woman would mark his destiny, a harbinger of a future pregnant with strange and suggestive encounters between the two that would lead to a tempestuous relationship, protagonists of an impossible, tragic and passionate love in the context of a Russia violently torn apart by the revolution of 1917 and the advent of a new order.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
“Gustave Flaubert’s best-known novel and one of the great works of universal literature brings us closer to the story of Emma Rouault, a young woman of peasant origin and motherless who marries the doctor Charles Bovary. The desire to be the protagonist of a romantic life presided over by love, an ambition that her husband cannot satisfy, will be the downfall of the naive girl, who will seek by all means, with adventures and with lovers, to escape the tedium, monotony and exasperation that They have taken over your life.”
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
“The mere mention of the name Anna Karenina immediately suggests two great themes of the nineteenth-century novel: passion and adultery. Anna Karenina, which Tolstoy began writing in 1873 and would not see published in book form until 1878, is a comprehensive disquisition on the family institution and, as Víctor Gallego (author of this new translation) says, ‘a fable about the search for happiness”.
Like water for chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
“With great wisdom and sparkling sensuality, its author manages, in the hearth of an old kitchen, to translate the passion and love repressed by the harsh morality of a Mexican family. Generational reflection, praise of secrecy and love.”
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
“In the last days of World War II, four characters meet in a ruined villa in Tuscany: an enigmatic man with no memory, who is dying with his body completely burned, a young nurse who believes she brings misfortune to those she loves, a cynical mutilated survivor and a Sikh dedicated to the deactivation of explosives… Four foreigners of themselves, trapped in the rear of their memories, who are recomposing the shattered mosaic of their identities through the intermittent and tormented revelations of a love story and jealousy.”