"Books are love letters" Great stories to share on Valentine’s Day
Feb 11 2021
The best books to give to someone you love
There’s no better Valentine’s Day gift than a book.When you share a great book with a friend, lover, or partner, you forge a new connection between two people. You explore this story world together, discovering new characters, places, and ideas. “My mother worried that because I was holed up in my room reading, I would become socially stunted,” writes Donalyn Miller in “The Book Whisperer.” “To the contrary, reading would connect me to the most important people in my life.” Miller loves to share books with her husband, and he turns to her for great stories to read together. Miller describes the special role books play in her relationship:“Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words. Neither one of us could imagine spending our life with someone who did not read.”
Love letter books
What book do you share like a love letter with people you care about? Share a photo of the book on Instagram and tag it #LoveLetterBooks. We’ll add your suggestions to our growing list of recommendations.The Fable app is designed for social reading, making it super easy for you to share your thoughts, highlight favorite lines, take notes, and have discussions while reading together with any number of readers—from your whole book club to your best friend. You can open up a Book Club for just two people this Valentine’s Day, creating a special world where you and your partner can read together (learn how to create your own Fable Book Club here). Try reading a book together with a close friend, lover, or partner this Valentine’s Day! To get you started, we share Fable Folios with members every month — exceptional books handpicked by tastemakers, experts, acclaimed authors, world-class athletes, and industry titans. Here are a few about love!Let’s Talk About Love
A Folio looking at the different ways love surfaces across literature and centuries. This collection includes modern classics and a free classic about lost love that everybody should read. Irish novelist Naoise Dolan chose the books in this Folio. She’s lived around the globe, including Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, and England. Her debut novel “Exciting Times” has inspired many readers and earned a spot on many “Best of 2020” lists.“Love is messy and can happen between anyone. It’s probably what makes life worth living."
Readers share their favorite love letter books
“Eleanor & Park” by Rainbow Rowell
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits-smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love-and just how hard it pulled you under. (Recommended by Tracey and Teresa Strait)
“Wintering” by Katherine May
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas. (Recommended by Helena Brantley and Matty D)
“Love and Rage” by Lama Rod Owens
Love and Rage weaves the inimitable wisdom and lived experience of Lama Rod Owens with Buddhist philosophy, practical meditation exercises, mindfulness, tantra, pranayama, ancestor practices, energy work, and classical yoga. The result is a book that serves as both a balm and a blueprint for those seeking justice who can feel overwhelmed with anger--and yet who refuse to relent. It is a necessary text for these times.(Recommended by Helena Brantley)
“Boy Swallows Universe” by Trent Dalton
Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom—all before starting high school. A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.(Recommended by Debbie Sauer)
“Fish in a Tree” by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
Ally has been smart enough to fool a lot of smart people. Every time she lands in a new school, she is able to hide her inability to read by creating clever yet disruptive distractions. She is afraid to ask for help; after all, how can you cure dumb? However, her newest teacher Mr. Daniels sees the bright, creative kid underneath the trouble maker. With his help, Ally learns not to be so hard on herself and that dyslexia is nothing to be ashamed of.(Recommended by Heather Damico)
“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.(Recommended by Matty D)
“Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry
Gus and Call, now retired from the Texas Rangers and settled in the border town of Lonesome Dove running the Hat Creek Cattle Company, are visited by their old friend Jake Spoon, who convinces Gus and Call to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north to Montana in order to start a cattle ranch in untouched territory.(Recommended by Heather)
“Life, a User's Manual” by George Perec
"There are a few I always buy and give to people I love if I see them, but they don't pop up that often,” says author and musician Chris Eaton. The Week once described what makes this book so special: “In this wondrously optimistic book, he sidles through the lives of the inhabitants of a single Paris apartment block and manages to convey scintillas of every aspect of the human condition—proving that, while ultimately without point, life is a continuum rich beyond belief, and so very well worth living.”(Recommended by Chris Eaton)
“The Sun Does Shine” by Anthony Ray Hinton
Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty–year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.(Recommended by Kelli Gould)
“We Were Here” by Matt de la Peña
From the streets of Stockton to the beaches of Venice, all the way to the Mexican border, We Were Here follows a journey of self-discovery by a boy who is trying to forgive himself in an unforgiving world.(Recommended by Teresa Strait)
“Room” by Emma Donoghue
Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her precocious young son finally gain their freedom, and the boy experiences the outside world for the first time. To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.