Let’s Celebrate Love! – All the different fictional loves

Love is in the air! Whether you have a significant other you deeply love, a group of tight-knit friends, whether you love yourself or don’t even celebrate Valentine’s Day, love is something we all come across in our lives. Since this time of the year is filled with hearts, pink decor, and chocolates, I thought I would share with you some of my favourite fictional loves and relationships I recently read in my favourite books.

The love of the hunt 💕

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favourite detectives, and I think you all know what kind of person he is. With his lack of empathy and very rarely ever engages in a relationship in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s entire series of short stories and novels, I think what Holmes really love is hunting and solving murders. It’s a unique kind of love, but still an exciting one to read about.

The love for a new friendship 💘

In The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson, our main character David has very few friends in his high school. However when he meets a new student he slowly develops a friendship with him that is unique and lovely to read about. It’s something I rarely ever read in books, and this new development of a friendship is definitely something we all have experienced when coming into a new environment. That feeling of eagerness, bonding with someone you want to get to know more, is definitely a lovely feeling.

The love for a country that is not your own💖

Immigration, second generations, and being an outsider in a place you want to call home are themes deeply discussed in Madeleine Thien‘s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. It’s one of the books I read a long time ago and feel like I haven’t talked about much in this blog. It’s such a gorgeously written story that covers a lot of different kinds of love, but this particular one resonates quite deeply with me, being someone living in a country that is not my own.

The harsh love of a mother to a daughter💕

Though we do see a lot of mother-daughter loves, what I’d like to highlight in this one is the relationship between Mrs Richardson and Izzy in Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. How sometimes, especially during our teenage years, a daughter would deny her love for her mother, and this misunderstood, messy relationship is really prevalent in the book. It’s heartbreaking but feels so very real.

The love of a brother to a sister💖

In a similar vein we have the gentle and quiet love between the two children in the main family of Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper, one of my favourite books of 2018. I adored reading about this brother-sister relationship, how they care for each other in different ways and how they miss each other when they’re apart.

The love out of duty and responsibility💖

In Pachinko, one of my recent favourite reads, Min Jin Lee explores lots of different kinds of love. But what I really want to showcase here is the love Sunja has for the husband she never asked for – when at first she didn’t really love her husband, whom she married out of duty, their relationship grew slowly into something beautiful and heartbreaking.

The love for a childhood friend💕

This is a book I read a long time ago, but Khaled Hosseini’s characters in The Kite Runner are always in the back of my mind. The main character’s friendship when he was a child was the main storyline throughout the book, and it reminds me of close friendships I had with my neighbours and fellow children that I still remember until today.

 

The love that inevitably blossomed💖

This last kind of love is a little bit of a spoiler, so I won’t say much about it. It’s from a recent read, The Essex Serpent, and it’s a kind of relationship or love that is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and Sarah Perry was able to write it all so wonderfully in a very lyrical way.

Some interesting Valentine’s Day posts from fellow bloggers:

• Valentine’s books for any kind of reader – Aurora Librialis
• Blogger friends recommend their favourite romance novels – Merline Reads
• Tainted love – 13 books for the non romantically inclined – Reading Under the Blankie

What are your favourite loves in fiction? And do you resonate with some of the loves I mentioned? Let’s celebrate all kinds of love, both platonic and not, down in the comments below.

Talk to you next time, Ayunda

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