Last-Minute Romantic Book Ideas for That Special Someone What's today? If you answered "Tuesday," you're in trouble. Need to visit a bookstore on the way home for a last-minute Valentine's Day gift? Current and former staff members of the Book Review have suggestions for you. Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Critic Doomed love; heaving chests; hippity-hop heart palpitations. My pick is unavoidable, a Mac truck of romantic woe coming toward you down the wrong side of the highway: "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë. "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods," Catherine says. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary. On the flip side, a favorite unrequited love story is "Minor Characters" by Joyce Johnson, a memoir about her youthful relationship with Jack Kerouac. It's just lovely, and packed with yearning for love and life. Pamela Paul, Children's Books and Features Editor Most of what I read is terribly unromantic. But when it comes to love stories, I generally like lots of suffering and near-impossible courtship under dreadful, constrained circumstances: "Anna Karenina," "Jane Eyre," "Daniel Deronda." In terms of young-adult books, I found "Graceling" by Kristin Cashore enormously romantic. Also, not easy circumstances. Jen McDonald, Preview Editor I tend to like my literary love dark and doomed, so my pick is Anne Enright's "The Gathering," a novel whose tragedy unspools from a pulse-quickening romantic scene in the third chapter. It's a flashback to the moment the narrator's grandmother, Ada Merriman, first laid eyes on Lambert Nugent, who would not become her husband but would play an outsize role in the lives of her descendants. The two meet in Dublin, in a hotel lobby, and it's a beautiful, classic, across-the-room, love-at-first-sight encounter that begins: "They were alone. ... And in the quietness of their attention they each realized the strength of the other and the fact that neither would be the first to walk away. ... It has already happened." Sam Tanenhuas, Editor of the Book Review Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." The book is more about sorrows than joys, but keyed to "the intermittences of the heart." Barry Gewen, Preview Editor D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" is not so much about people as it is about elemental forces, but I'd say once you've read his stellar (in both senses of the word) image of what love between a man and a woman can be, it never leaves you. I'd also urge everyone who hasn't read it to read Wislawa Szymborska's "A Happy Love" as an appropriate way to mourn her death on Valentine's Day, as well as for a sense of what love feels like from the inside. Jennifer Schuessler, Culture Reporter Books can be dangerous gifts in all but the most solid of relationships. Who hasn't had a budding affair - or even a seemingly solid marriage - destroyed by an impetuous declaration of love for Ayn Rand or Clive Cussler? Or "The Paris Wife," for that matter: turnabout is fair play, ladies. If I were feeling really brave, my Valentine's Day gift would be "Mating," Norman Rush's big novel of grand passion and anthropology that I loved so much I'm afraid to reread it, lest the intense two weeks we spent together back in 1992 turn out to be a case of literary beer goggles. To be on the shorter if not necessarily safer side, I'd give Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage," both because it's all about procrastination and because it's the last book I fell madly in love with. O.K., it's about D.H. Lawrence (and Englishness, and travel, and home repair, and a bunch of other things), but it does contain this great line, among many others: "How can you know anything about literature at all if all you've done is read books?" Nothing romantic there, but sometimes you need a sneakier literary come-on. On a more punitive note for those with faulty planning skills, Alida Becker, a preview editor for the Book Review, said, "The perfect gift for procrastinators would be "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" by Edward Gorey, an illustrated alphabet of all the terrible things that can happen to a person ... especially a person who forgets Valentine's Day."