I have a colleague who has decided to sponsor a cat for this Valentine's Day, which I thought was a capital plan!

But if you're already "sponsoring" a pussy or two, and chocolate and roses aren't your thang, why not take the high-road and buy your sweetie-lump a book that will set his or her heart, and possibly their loins, aflame?

My short-list for V-Day Reading:

Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.  This tragic novel of unrequited love leading to Young Werther's suicide had a tremendous cultural resonance when it appeared in Germany in 1774, spawning a generation of Werther-wannabes, and a host of copy-cat suicides.  Love is suicide!  Rock on!

Stendhal's Love (De L'Amour). More unrequited love, this time from the master who brought you the steamy hand-holding scenes between Julien Sorel and Madame de Rênal in Le Rouge et le Noir (these are seriously some of my favorite passages in all of literature). Love takes us through the stages of the affliction long before Kübler-Ross ever proposed hers (grief, love, same difference).

Kierkegaard's Either/Or.  This heavyweight collection has some powerful observations about the varieties of love and despair.  For Valentine's Day you might mark a couple of sections in "Either": "The First Love," and "Diary of a Seducer," Where our boy Søren explores the aesthete's experience of love, and deems it, well, prefatory, let's say. 

(If you like to listen to music while reading, why not pop in Elliott Smith's album Either/Or while reading Kierkegaard's book?  Smith, a remarkable talent, is also a good pick for Valentine's Day, as his life ended tragically, in 2003 at the age of 34, when he either stabbed himself twice in the chest with a steak knife or his girlfriend  Jennifer Chiba did it for him after a row.  The supposed suicide note was written on a post-it, with Smith's name misspelled. The case is still open.)  

Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse Fragments.  For those of you on the go who only have time for some quick poststructuralist soundbites on the way to your semiotic pilates class this is the one for you. 

Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil). Now we're getting somewhere. You can read this one as an Idiot's Guide to spicing up your tired old treadmill of a you-call-that-a-sex-life??  All you need are some hard-boiled eggs, a vagina and/or an anus!  Who knew? 

Henry Miller's Crazy Cock. Don't bother reading it.  It's not anywhere near his best work.  It's just cool to have on your bookshelf.