Our Readers Choose Their Favorite Love Stories

In a recent exchange on Book World's blog, Short Stack, romance fans listed their favorite novels:

Classics and Old Chestnuts

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. A married woman looks for love in forbidding St. Petersburg.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. Charles plans to divorce his wife so that he can marry Julia.

The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. A gay classic, published in the white-hot umbrage of the '50s.

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. As one reader said, "Those Russians know how to steam it up."

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. Hopeless infatuation in an era of gathering doom.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He parties, hoping to lure back an old love.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Love and lovelessness among the upper classes.

The Painted Veil, by Somerset Maugham. He cares for her so much that he will accept all humiliation.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Realism meets irony in this novel of love and manners.

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Inspired by Jane Eyre, a story about a beleaguered bride.

Villette, by Charlotte Bronte. A teacher finds love at an all girls' school.