Unfinished Thought Catalog Post on Romance Books

I go to books to learn in them what I can’t find in real life. To understand things that through imagination and pondering, can be applied back to the real world. To understand romance is to understand the idea of it, the deconstruction of the idea and the re-application of those ideas back into the real world. We can all benefit from these books for women about romance because they are realistic of how we can be, and hopeful for what we can become.

1.     Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

There’s a reason this novel has lasting power. It’s not about love. There’s no happily ever after. However, it is an examination of the idea of love. Of the romantic and of the value of art. It’s uniquely French and yet it is universal, for it is about how the idea of another person can fall so short of who they really are and how two people that once were so intimate can become strangers. It’s about Madame Bovary and she does not get a happy ending. She does dream of one though, and without her dreams – we wouldn’t have this story.

2.     Something Blue by Emily Giffin

This is a novel about a person you do not like, and that nobody likes. A person who pushes too fast and stretches too thin. A PR agent named Darcy Rhone, who’s best friend slept and ran away with her fiancée. A real world look at the barriers we put up, the people we slight, our walls when we put them down and how a judgement of someone can be so horribly different from the deeper person that lies within.