What Is The Rory Gilmore Reading List?
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1 month ago
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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
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcot
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- A Room with a View by E M Forster
- The Shining by Stephen King
- The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
- 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