What Is The Rory Gilmore Reading List?

If there’s one television character of recent years who can safely be described as a bookworm, it’s Rory Gilmore. Daughter of Lorelai Gilmore and portrayed by Alexis Bledel in The CW’s seminal series, Gilmore Girls, Rory always has a book in hand (or backpack, or clutchbag), declaring in the series: ‘I just take a book with me everywhere. It’s just a habit.’ She reads on the bus, at lunchtime at school, and even if she’s at a fancy event, you can bet Rory has squeezed a book into her handbag. As a result, hundreds of books are spotted in the series, spanning classic books to modern big-hitters, including everything from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling to The Crucible by Arthur Miller – and beady eyed fans have collated a list of every single one. Thus the Rory Gilmore Reading List was born – and it’s the perfect autumnal activity if you’ve finished the series and have a lot (a lot) of free time on your hands. Here’s what you need to know.

What Is The Rory Gilmore Reading List?

The Rory Gilmore Reading List is a 400-book-strong list of every novel, non-fiction work and collection of poems read or carried by Rory Gilmore in the seven seasons of Gilmore Girls. Some lists also include books seen in the revival, A Year in the Life.

Some fans of the show see this list as a challenge. But, in short, it’s a lot – so we’ve included some highlights to get started with below.

60 Must-Read Books On The Rory Gilmore Reading List

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
6. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
13. Ulysses by James Joyce
14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
15. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
18. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
19. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
20. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
21. Beloved by Toni Morrison
22. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
23. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
24. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
25. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
26. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
27. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
28. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
29. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
30. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
31. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
32. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
33. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
34. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
35. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
36. The Iliad by Homer
37. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
38. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
39. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
40. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
41. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
42. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
43. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
44. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
45. Atonement by Ian McEwan
46. Dracula by Bram Stoker
47. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
48. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
49. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
50. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
51. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
52. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
53. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
54. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
55. Little Women by Louisa May Alcot
56. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
57. A Room with a View by E M Forster
58. The Shining by Stephen King
59. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
60. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

For more of the Rory Gilmore Reading List, you can find a community-created bookshelf on Goodreads here and a shoppable list on bookshop.org