"and Lolita (best romance novel I've read, no matter what you've heard about it.)" >>6
I've heard many people refer to Lolita as a beautiful romance novel, garnering praise from well-known sources such as Maxim magazine who extol it as 'The only true love story of our time' or other such nonsense. It's all bullshit-- anyone who claims such has never read/finished the novel.
Lolita is not a love story and anyone who has even the slightest inclination towards younger girls would do well to condemn this novel outright, rather than rally behind it. Although the novel starts off describing the main character, Humbert Humbert, as a engaging romantic intellectual, we gradually come to understand his duplicitous side-- one that's willing to immediately take advantage of any situation that turns in his favor and one that's willing to use violence to achieve his unrealistic dreams.
About halfway through the book, Dolores (Lolita)'s mother dies in a tragic automobile collision. Humbert Humbert, seeing an opportunity, feigns remorse and gains custody of the young girl. Afterwards, he takes her on a road trip across the country, raping her in every hotel in which they stay. I use "rape" here in the literal sense, using violence or threat of violence to force someone to have intercourse, and not the ill-conceived "statutory rape" that has percolated through mass media and into the public consciousness. Somehow, Dolores (who Humbert insists on calling Lolita) manages to escape this nightmare and runs away, only to fall into the hands of another monster who forces her to have sex with other boys in his barn while he videotapes it. All in all, Humbert Humbert systematically destroys the life of this poor young girl and somehow feels no remorse, having satisfied his own desires and justifying it with the arrogant eloquence of a learned man.
The point of Lolita is not to paint a romanticized picture of a man so engrossed in his deviant romantic fantasies; that would be a grave oversimplification of this great novel and contrary to who Humbert Humbert actually is. Humbert Humbert is despicable in every sense of the word-- by the end of the novel he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Rather, the point of Lolita is to show how insidious and deceiving well-wrought intellectual characters can be; the irony being that the most romantic person can sometimes be the most delusional and monstrous.
In conclusion, read Lolita, but don't think of it as a romance novel.