With the success of PostSecret and its anonymous personal submissions, the obsession with unlocking others’ secrets has expanded to an even juicier subject: matters of the heart.

“Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See” provides readers with love letters of every variety, including traditional declarations of love to messages of hurt and hate. It’s a lot for one sitting but worth a read.

Flipping through the book’s pages – all replicas of the original letters and devoid of any page numbers – it is hard to predict if the next message will be one celebrating 40 years of marriage, relating a saucy one-night stand, or bringing a relationship to a close.

One menacingly reads, “I should never have given you a second chance,” while a few page flips reveal huge-typed lettering, joking, “Where do you stand on chains?”

Others are more traditionally gushy – and boring – “I shall love you until I draw my last breath, and beyond.”

Reading through, I surprisingly found myself enjoying the angry notes more than the sentimental messages. One titled by the author as “Liar (Written 183 Times)” features just that. Those 183 handwritten lines of the word portray the author’s emotions with more power than any poem of angst could.

The unpredictability of what will come next with each page kept me reading through the writings. Editor Bill Shapiro presents the letters in their original form, and the medium often becomes more interesting and powerful than the message.

There are both handwritten and typed notes, and the messages are carried on restaurant napkins, Western Union telegrams, text message inboxes, e-mails and Post-it notes.

The food stains and ink blotches on the letters reinforce their realness, making reading more like an intimate, possibly unwelcome, peek into another’s relationship. It will leave readers feeling a little voyeuristic, like they’re sneaking a glance through someone’s dresser drawers, which is exactly what Shapiro intended.

But watch for – and possibly avoid – the very end of the book; it relates the backgrounds of several of the love letters. At first I was eager to see where the messages originated from, but as I read through them discovering that right after a lovely letter was penned, the subject of the message had died, it spoiled part of the reading experience.

The idea of the anonymous writings is to get a glimmer into an unknown life and the emotions and feelings of lovers at specific moments as they poured out their love or hurt. And readers don’t need to know what happened afterward, whether it was a breakup the following morning or a marriage 10 years down the road.

– Laura Picklesimer