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Hi.

Welcome to This Awful/Awesome Life! My name is Frances Joyce. I am the publisher and editor of this magazine. We'll be exploring different topics each month to inform, entertain and inspire you. Meet new authors, sharpen your brain and pick up a few tips on life, love, entertaining and business. Enjoy and please share!

June 2025 Romantic Reading Recommendations for Adults By Fran Joyce

Our June reading recommendations for adults are a bit different this month. In honor of the romantic month of June I have two lists for you.

The first list contains authors and at least one novel or play they penned with passages so romantic they take our breath away.

Sometimes the hero and heroine of the story get  their happily ever after, but sometimes they don’t.

Those of us lucky enough to experience a great romance can appreciate the gift it brings to this journey we call life. The second list is composed of books of poetry by poets known for some of the most romantic poems ever written. The lists are in no particular order.

What plays, novels, authors, or poets would you add to these lists?

Great Romances

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Tristan and Isolde – A Celtic Legend based on an actual Pict King – the original poem which told the story was not preserved, but the legend remains in poems, books, and films.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Maurice by E.M. Forster

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The Thornbirds by Colleen McCollough

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks

Outlander by Diane Gabaldon

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin

 

Poetry for Romantics

And the Time Is… by Samuel Hazo

They Rule the World by Samuel Hazo

The Book of Love by Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Love Her Wild by Atticus

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

Sonnets from the Portuguese: And Other Love Poems By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Sun and Her Fowers by Rupi Kaur

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Selected Poems of Lord Byron

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

June 2025 Reading Recommendations for Kids and YA by Fran Joyce

June 2025 in Pictures by Fran Joyce