Reading Like Rory Gilmore

I’ll admit it, I watch the Gilmore Girls all the time. I get made fun of mercilessly for watching it, but I think its a fun show. I like the fact that Rory is a bookaholic, and somewhat like me when I was in high school. I also like that this show leans on the intellectual side by throwing out references to literary works as well as classic and contemporary pop culture fads. Everytime I watch an episode, even if its for the 12th time, I learn or pick up on something new from the show. Its the type of show that ages well. The ensemble cast means that there are plenty of personalities to latch onto over a lengthy span of time (in my case 10 years).

This list is for Rory’s book list, movie and music list mentioned on the show. Her list includes the official list from the WB website, as well as her own contributions of titles mentioned on the show that were not on the WB list.

Other Rory Resources

• The Gilmore Girls Wiki with detailed episode by episode list of the books, movies and music mentioned in the show, as well as cast and show trivia, bios & more.
• You can find a similar list of the books of the Gilmore Girls via the Black, White & Read Bookstore Blog.
• The GoodReads Rory Gilmore Book Club for all your GG needs. The group reads two books from Rory’s list each month.

The first group of crossed-out titles are the books that I have read. You can click on the hyperlinks to read my reviews. The next set of books are the titles that I have yet to read, and will keep adding to as I found out about the different titles referenced to on the show. If you know of any, let me know!

The List – Books Read

1. 1984  (George Orwell)
2. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [Betty Smith]
4. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank
5. Atonement: A Novel (Ian McEwan)
6. Autobiography of a Face (Lucy Grealy)
7. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel (Dai Sijie)
8. Bee Season: A Novel (Myla Goldberg)
9. Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)
10. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
11. Beowulf
12. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
13. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems (Edgar Allan Poe)
14. Daisy Miller (Henry James)
15. Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
16. Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable (Mark Dunn)
17. Emma (Jane Austen)
18. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
19. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Greg Critser)
20. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
21. Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger)
22. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
23. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
24. Holidays on Ice: Stories (David Sedaris)
25. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
26. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
27. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
28. Lord of the Flies William Golding)
29. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
30. Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)
31. Night (Elie Wiesel)
32. Old School (Tobias Wolff)
33. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
34. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
35. Othello (William Shakespeare)
36. Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
37. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
38. Rosemary’s Baby (Ira Levin)
39. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
40. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
41. The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
42. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
43. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger
44. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)
45. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
46. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
47. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
48. The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
49. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
50. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
51. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Kidd)
52. The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
53. The Story of My Life (Helen Keller)
54. The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
55. Time and Again (Jack Finney)
56. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
57. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Gregory Maguire)

The List – Books Unread

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
2. Mencken Chrestomathy (H.L. Mencken)
3. A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister (Julie Mars)
4. A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
5. A Quiet Storm: A Novel (Rachel Howzell Hall)
6. A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf)
7. A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
8. American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
9. Brick Lane (Monica Ali)
10. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
11. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Eudora Welty)
12. Cousin Bette (Honoré de Balzac)
13. Crime and Punimensht (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
14. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
15. Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)
16. Demons (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
17. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
18. Eleanor Roosevelt (Blanche Wiesen Cook)
19. Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
20. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
21. Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door 2007: The Travel Skills Handbook (Rick Steves)
22. Extravagance: A Novel (Gary Krist)
23. Flowers for Algernon
24. Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut)
25. How the Light Gets in (M. J. Hyland)
26. How to Breathe Underwater (Julie Orringer)
27. Howl (Allen Ginsberg)
28. Inherit the Wind (Jerome Lawrence)
29. Just a Couple of Days (Tony Vigorito)
30. Leaves of Grass (Walt Witman)
31. Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)
32. Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
33. Living History (Hillary Rodham Clinton)
34. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Simone de Beauvoir)
35. Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
36. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
37. Monsieur Proust (Celeste Albaret)
38. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
39. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Seymour M. Hersh)
40. My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru (Tim Guest)
41. My Sister’s Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
42. Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature (Jan Lars Jensen)
43. New Poems of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)
44. Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 (Dawn Powell)
45. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
46. Oliver Twist (Oliver Twist)
47. Oracle Night (Paul Auster)
48. Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
49. Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
50. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Legs McNeil)
51. Property (Valerie Martin)
52. Pushkin: A Biography (T.J. Binyon)
53. Quattrocento (James Mckean)
54. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nafisi)
55. Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad (Virginia Holman)
56. Sacred Time (Ursula Hegi)
57. Sanctuary (William Faulkner)
58. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Nancy Milford)
59. Seabiscuit: An American Legend (Laura Hillenbrand)
60. Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
61. Small Island (Andrea Levy)
62. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Ernest Hemingway)
63. Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (Julia de Burgos)
64. Songbook (Nick Hornby)
65. Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov)
66. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach)
67. Swann’s Way (Marcel Proust)
68. Swimming With Giants: My Encounters With Whales, Dolphins, and Seals (Anne Collett)
69. Sybil (Flora Rheta Schreiber)
70. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
71. Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
72. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
73. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
74. The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
75. The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews (Peter Duffy)
76. The Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse)
77. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexander Dumas)
78. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Erik Larson)
79. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
80. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)
81. The Fortress of Solitude (Jonathan Lethem)
82. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
83. The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
84. The Group (Mary McCarthy)
85. The Holy Barbarians (lawrence lipton)
86. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo)
87.  
88. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar (Robert Alexander)
89. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
90. The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (Gore Vidal)
91. The Little Locksmith: A Memoir (Katharine Butler Hathaway)
92. The Lottery: And Other Stories (Shirley Jackson)
93. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
94. The Manticore (Robertson Davies)
95. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
96. The Meaning of Consuelo (Judith Ortiz Cofer)
97. The Metamorphosis (Ovid)
98. The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
99. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
100. The Nanny Diaries (Emma McLaughlin)
101. The Opposite of Fate (Amy Tan)
102. The Polysyllabic Spree (Nick Hornby)
103. The Portable Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Parker)
104. The Portable Nietzsche
105. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (Ron Suskind)
106. The Razor’s Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)
107. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
108. The Rough Guide to Europe 2006 (Various Authors)
109. The Scarecrow of Oz (L. Frank Baum)
110. The Second Sex (Simone De Beauvoir)
111. The Song of Names (Norman Lebrecht)
112. The Song Reader (Lisa Tucker)
113. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
114. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
115. The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters (Elisabeth Robinson)
116. Unabridged Journals (Sylvia Plath)
117. The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
118. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship (Ann Patchett)
119. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
120. Unless (Carol Shields)
121. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
122. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
123. When the Emperor Was Divine (Julie Otsuka)
124. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee)
125. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Rebecca Wells)