Favourite Romance Book // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 20

Today is the twentieth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite romance book".

I am currently in self-imposed quarantine after being potentially exposed to COVID-19. This is not an ideal situation for my health, but it has been a net positive for this blog, which has been receiving much more attention since I've been confined to my flat. So, in the interest of preserving the momentum we've had going for the last two posts, let's move swiftly into the topic of this entry: my favourite romance book.

As with several other posts I've written for this challenge, preparing for this one involved a lot of time spent thinking about how I could find a loophole in the prompt. I don't read a lot of books that I would class specifically as 'romance', so I was finding it difficult to choose a book that fit that category. Even the few books in which I particularly enjoyed the romantic element have already either been written about (Carol) or earmarked for a later post (Fingersmith). I thought that I could pretend to have misinterpreted the prompt as meaning a book from the Romanticism period of literature and chosen something like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a result. Or I could act like it meant Romance as in 'Romance languages' and thus be able to pick any book written in Italian, French, Spanish, and so on. Thankfully, I ended up not having to use either of these slightly deceitful approaches, as I remembered the perfect romance book for this post at the last minute.

In the end, the book I chose was Penguins Poems for Love, edited by Laura Barber.

This book, as the title suggests, is a collection of poems by various authors on the subject of love. The poems are split into categories named as adverbs, in response to the famous question 'How do I love thee?'. In order from first to last, they are:

• Suddenly
• Secretly
• Nearly
• Tentatively
• Haplessly
• Incurably
• Impatiently
• Superlatively
• Persuasively
• Passionately
• The morning after
• Greedily
• Truly, madly, deeply
• From a distance
• With a vow
• Happily ever after
• Treacherously
• Brutally
• Bitterly
• Finally
• Forsaken
• Regretfully
• Fatally
• Indifferently
• After death
• Eternally

As you might have guessed from the sheer number of sections listed above, the book is rather large. It numbers about 400 pages in total, and that is while it's in a large-paged hardback edition. It's a physically beautiful book, the kind of thing you could imagine keeping for years, giving as a present for a special occasion, or perhaps passing on to a younger generation. The original hardback version, pictured above, has the word LOVE spelt out in big letters on a red spine, with the words "love, lust, life, loss, love" written in smaller print between the characters. This edition even comes with two red ribbon bookmarks sewn in - the height of luxury. There's something rather romantic - in the sense of being idealised or extravagant - even in the book's outer appearance.

What I really like about this collection, and what makes it my favourite romance book, is its variety. As you can tell from the many categories of poems and even the words on the spine, Penguin's Poems for Love illustrates both the breadth and diversity of love, from the selfless to the toxic, from the fleeting to the immortal. As someone who often feels that people's varied experiences of love are too frequently flattened into one universal feeling, I appreciated this book's attempt to depict romance in its many forms. 

Besides thematic variety, I also enjoyed the diversity of the book's featured poets. While there are plenty of classic, famous love poems in the collection, like several of Shakespeare's sonnets, there are also some lesser-known poems as well. Likewise, they vary in length, style, and origin. This variety was deliberate; Barber even states this intention in the introductory notes, writing: 'my aim has been to range as widely as possible, historically and geographically.'

All in all, Penguin's Poems for Love is a lovely book with a beautiful design, a great variety of poems, and a charming way of displaying them. It might be impossible to find a single book that encapsulates the vastness of romantic love, but you could do a lot worse than this one.