Ellen McCarthy's 6 favorite books about weddings and marriage

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close (Vintage, $15). In her spectacularly funny 2011 debut novel, Close perfectly captures the period of 20-something life that is overtaken by weddings — and showers, engagement parties, bachelorette getaways, etc. This book will feel all too real to readers who are currently spending all of their weekends (and disposable income) at other people's weddings.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Dover, $4). The book that taught me that wit and intellect are every bit as attractive as physical beauty. We spend most of Jane Austen's classic watching Elizabeth Bennet spar with Mr. Darcy, even as she unwillingly falls in love with him.

One Perfect Day by Rebecca Mead (Penguin, $15). If you want to sidestep the multibillion-dollar wedding-industrial complex, this is your bible. New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead uncovers all the commercial land mines and booby traps that mark the path to the altar.

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Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead, $16). Gilbert's underappreciated follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love is a meditation on what it means for two people to legally bind themselves to each other. Gilbert's case contains an additional wrinkle: The Department of Homeland Security threatened to deny an entry visa to the man she fell in love with in Bali unless they married. As she heads toward her own inevitable wedding, she looks around the world and into history to gain clarity on her deep ambivalence toward marriage.

Atonement by Ian McEwan (Anchor, $16). So many of the couples I've met have taught me that love almost never follows a straight line. Save perhaps for Romeo and Juliet, I can't think of another book that so wrenchingly illuminates the obstacles some lovers face as McEwan's novel does.

Vogue Weddings edited by Hamish Bowles (Knopf, $85). I was never much interested in the "stuff" of weddings — flowers, themes, burlap tablescapes — but I couldn't resist the allure of this gorgeous coffee-table book. It's an inside look at some of the world's most glamorous weddings, with photographs that will make you believe in fairy tales.

—Ellen McCarthy's new essay collection, The Real Thing, gathers the wisdom she acquired during the four years that she wrote the column "On Love" for The Washington Post. Below, she names six favorite works about weddings and marriage.