The TV show Gilmore Girls was a pretty integral part of my life for several years. My mom and I watched it together, my senior year high school roommate and I both enjoyed it, and my college roommate/maid of honor and I often found ourselves eschewing the social quagmire of the college cafeteria to enjoy a lunch with Lorelai and Rory in our dorm common room. I always related to Rory's perfectionism and bookworminess (although I remain skeptical of her ultimate romantic decisions), so imagine my delight when I came across this reading list on Pinterest!
Look how young she looks there!
It includes (supposedly) all the books she read during the seven seasons of the show. I'm sure many of these were for school, but others are clearly not. It's fun looking over this list and remembering the episode where she mentioned it or the context in which it fit (i.e. the Europe guidebooks for her and Lorelai's backpacking trip to Europe). I've gone through and crossed out the ones I've read (many also for school!) and highlighted ones I would like to read. Many of these I've never heard of, so I'm not sure whether I would want to read it or not! I'll have to investigate further...
The list is ridiculously long (8.5 pages single spaced in Word), so I won't bore you with the whole thing here (click the image above if you're interested). I think it has 250 books on it. I've read 56 of them...not too shabby! Here are some that were either already on my to-read list or will be added because of this:
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon
- Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
- Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Holidays on Ice and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Wilke
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Passage to India and A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Whew! That's a lot of books! But I love having a running list to work from when I finish a book. This list encompasses a lot that would fit into my amorphous goal of "reading more classics" (plus it doesn't hurt that those a free on Kindle).
I was intrigued by how all over the place Rory's list was. Lots of Stephen King and pop-y fiction, which surprised me, along with a lot of poetry and serious literature, which did not. I would love to talk books with Rory! Is there a fictional character you would love to hang out with or discuss a shared hobby with?
