Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks

by Annie Spence

In Love in Lowercase, a lost feline wanders into the apartment of a linguistics professor, Samuel, and becomes the stimulus for his breaking out of an introverted shell and leading him back to his childhood crush, Gabriela.

Books about marriages serve as a good frame for character development, and these two novels of husbands and wives don’t disappoint. In Fates and Furies, a husband and wife who began their relationship with a passionate romance find disorder lurking. Groff tells the story of the messy underbelly of this marriage from each spouse’s perspective. The Happy Marriage begins with a secret novel written by an unhappy husband who blames his marriage for his ailing health and career. Until his wife finds the book and begins journaling her own perspective. As in real relationships, none of these narrators are perfectly reliable, but they are reliably engrossing.

In The Intimates, Robbie and Maize meet in high school and, despite being drawn to each other, realize their relationship will not be sexual, so they decide to bond by becoming each other’s “human diaries.” The book is smart, sexy, and honest.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox, on the other hand, a novel that cleverly plays with the fairy-tale form, depicts a writer, Mr. Fox, whose muse comes to life and puts him inside his own stories. Upset that her husband is out traipsing through fairy tales with his muse, Mrs. Fox throws herself into the stories as well, and the writer must choose between his dream woman or the woman of his dreams.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett This novella features a librarian so against type, he’s not even technically a librarian. Even so, Norman the kitchen boy carries out the two most important tasks of a librarian: hooking readers on books and defending the freedom to read. The reader he hooks is none other than the queen of England,

Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart Librarians are bad-ass investigators, and this novel features one such research expert, Li Du, the wandering exiled imperial librarian, who, in 1708,

In One Person by John Irving

Love and the Art of War by Dinah Lee Küng Couldn’t get a cuter premise. Jane is a librarian in London who signs up for a seminar about saving her marriage. Except she accidentally wanders into the room across the hall, a seminar for businesspeople about using Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in their offices. The professor convinces her to stay and use the principles she learns to win her wayfaring husband

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em. —John Waters

Sage advice

Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari (translated by Anthony H. Chambers) This book of Japanese occult stories was written in 1776 and pulls you into dream worlds full of spirits; half-human, half-animal beings; and the occasional demon—all

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke Dystopian fiction sometimes feels like too much or hits too close to home. Good thing there is such a thing as utopian fiction and you would do yourself some good by beginning your idealist adventure with Clarke’s novel, often heralded as the closest thing to a perfect science fiction book that exists.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski This novel is classified as ergodic literature. I looked it up. I don’t get it. It doesn’t matter. Still amazeballs, but aggressive with the footnotes! This is a horror/love tale told from the perspective of a tattoo guy and the perplexing manuscript he finds in a dead man’s apartment.

Dahlgren by Samuel Delany Seventies sci-fi American magical realism metafiction. Does that make you scared or excited? Weird shit is happening in one Midwestern city. Like, time is passing differently for different people,

I don’t like the phrase “guilty-pleasure read” because I don’t think you should be ashamed of anything you read as long as it makes you happy

Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business by Dolly Parton This autobiography is also a soothing, easy read with substance. Dolly is undeniably smart ’n’ sweet.

Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe The British tend to do wit well, and Sutcliffe is particularly good at bright and charming novels that are sure to cure your book blues. In Whatever, three adult men neglect to send their moms cards on Mother’s Day, and the mamas get to talking.

Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett When you get into a cynical reading funk and everything you pick up seems to have the word “dystopian” in the summary, what you need is a book about someone who’s just as much of a cranky misanthrope as you—and learns to love life again.

(Pappy Sappy is an old man-fairy that sneaks into writers’ offices in the night to do a little maudlin’n’. He lives at Nicholas Sparks’s house.)

Classic, Sweet Revenge: Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, 1,240 pages (Yeah.)

Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön

The library is genius in its usefulness. It can be a different place for each person who walks in. Your library can help you find a job, go vegan, read up on the new medication you’ve been prescribed, or learn a new language.

There is no other place where you can go and basically say, “I need help with this area of my life” and someone will respond, “All right, let’s figure this out.”