Cozy Books to Snuggle Up With

You’ll never be at a loss for imagination with Sara Crewe, the heroine of this classic book. Even in her worst moments, Sara is conducting a love affair with life, whether it’s her intense friendships with the girls around her, the dolls she believes in so much, her missing father, or the rat and birds she tames and makes into friends. She is never alone because she always has her own resilience. And, like any true morality tale, Sara’s patience and fortitude pay off big time, but you can only love her for it.

Not one of the first books people usually cite when they think of this awe-inspiring novelist (those are usually Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Jazz), Love is nevertheless a Morrison must-read. The story of Bill Cosey, a deceased hotel owner, is really the story of the people around him, those he affected and who had an effect on him. Life and love feature in this brilliant non-linear, multi-voiced novel; it’s a reading-late-into-the-night-because-there’s-no-good-stopping-point kind of book.

In the novel that won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1920, Wharton draws a portrait of society in early 20th-century New York City, where her love-triangle — a man, his intended, and his intended’s more interesting and less duty-bound cousin — is both wonderfully relevant and utterly tragic. A novel of social mores and conventions, its prose is beautiful and witty.

Narrated by a boy who becomes a man, My Ántonia is one of those novels that will make your heart hurt, but in a good way. Following the story of the narrator’s childhood crush, Cather evokes the beautiful Nebraska setting in which the two characters grow up. Seemingly never as connected as the narrator would like them to be, there’s still a thread of love that passes between them and changes over their lifetimes, as the narrator watches his beloved and wishes he could be in her life. But due to various factors — one of which is Ántonia’s own desires — he can’t, so he makes do with sharing her story with us, the readers.

With one of the most beautiful and disturbing opening scenes to be found in contemporary literature, Land of Love and Drowning nevertheless achieves the goal of being a book to spoon with. Its characters stand tall, its prose is gripping, and as it tells a story of family, love, class, and race, you’ll disappear into the scenery of the Virgin Islands as they once were.

There are two things people often forget about Anna Karenina: first, it’s incredibly readable and fast-paced; second, it has two love stories and a myriad friendships and family relations in it. It isn’t all tragedy, doom, and gloom. There’s a reason some folks deem it to be the perfect novel—it has everything, from comedy to descriptive scenes to a saga-like passage of time to its two endings. There is a tragic ending, you know this going in—but there is also a happy one, one that will make your heart sing. And it’s well-worth the book’s length to reach that ending.

Despite having affairs numbering in the hundreds, a man can, apparently, keep his heart entirely set on one woman, to whom he will return over 50 years after telling this woman that he loved her. A must-read classic; Garcia Marquez is a masterful storyteller and will make you a romantic despite yourself.

Meaulnes is a boy-man, poised in that middle place which can stretch further than tween years, when he arrives in a new city in France and falls for a hidden girl at a party. Beloved by French readers for years and translated into English some years ago, this classic tells of yearning and seeking, the difficulties of growing up and into love, and the shimmering truths that can be found there.

Dystopian fiction isn’t often the kind of book you want to hug to your chest, but On Such a Full Sea is an exception. Its collective voice tells a story of lost love between a pair of young adults in a Baltimore of the future, a world in which cities are merely manufacturers. This isn’t your garden-variety race for survival, but rather a journey of a woman discovering herself, a family recovering from its loss, and a people together discovering the flaws in their systems. There is a tragic nature to this book that is impossible to resist. It’s an all-nighter kind of book, so save it for a weekend.