rory gilmore's reading list
postcard 64: fall is here, so here the infamous reading list—annotated and organized by me
In the twenty five years since Gilmore Girls first aired, the show has managed to mass a cult following and a large population that rewatches the show (or the first three seasons at least) every single fall. There is an enduring appeal and charm to this show, most of which comes from the seasonal quality of it. Set in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, the show is a concoction of everything that feels autumnal and nostalgic, from Rory’s dedication to academia, to the pre-polysterification sweater weather, to the small town coziness of it all.
Gilmore Girls is still extremely prevalent in current day pop culture, as new generations of teenagers every year refuse to let the show fade into oblivion. I first watched it when I was fifteen with my high school roommate and remember us both being absolutely in love with Jess (perhaps as we all are as fifteen year olds). My opinions, especially on Rory’s three love interests, have grown and evolved in the last ten years, especially as I’ve watched bits of the show over my little sister’s shoulder every fall, but one thing that has not changed is the fondness I have for Rory’s unapologetic love of reading.
It’s September, which is fall, so here is every book Rory is seen reading throughout the show. I organized the list in sub genres and alphabetically, as it is a massive list. I have also highlighted my favorites and put a star after the title! This took me way longer than I expected and has pretty much been a monthlong project, but I’m excited that I finally have this to refer to (this list was honestly for me as much as it was for you).
I don’t like a lot of the books on here and think that you should not read them (The Fountainhead, Churchill’s biography etc), but I just included and categorized everything. Please keep in mind that some of these are extremely outdated in terms of political correctness (and correctness in general).
side note: if you enjoy reading and things that intellectually stimulate you, check out my how to get smart again series, in which I try to tackle post grad brain rot and my diminishing attention span from short form media. here is the lineup! the first four parts have already been posted, which you can find in the link above.
I’m also doing weekly syllabus posts of books, lectures, essays, podcasts, movies, and video essays I want to visit for the week, so check that out here!
pre 19th century classics
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Beowulf
The Bhagavad Gita
19th century classics
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Emma by Jane Austen ★
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ★
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen ★
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë ★
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë ★
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ★
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky ★
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens ★
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens ★
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Cinderella by The Brothers Grimm
Snow White and Rose Red by Brothers Grimm
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol ★
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ★
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ★
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ★
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Celebrated Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ★
20th century classics
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov ★
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ★
Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides ★
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner ★
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ★
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Marathon Man by William Goldman
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson ★
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Trial by Franz Kafka ★
Ironweed by William Kennedy
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Carrie by Stephen King
Christine by Stephen King
The Shining by Stephen King
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ★
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham ★
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier ★
Beloved by Toni Morrison ★
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Fletch by Gregory McDonald
Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller ★
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath ★
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger ★
Shane by Jack Shaefer
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ★
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ★
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan ★
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut ★
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams ★
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton ★
Roman Fever by Edith Wharton
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ★
contemporary fiction (21st century)
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon ★
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ★
How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Atonement by Ian McEwan ★
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett ★
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
memoir
Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom ★
Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter by Simone De Beauvoir
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion ★
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
My Life as Author and Editor by H.L. Mencken
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov ★
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath ★
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of A Writing Life by Amy Tan
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
philosophy
The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir ★
The Art of Living by Epictetus
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Bhagavad Gita
Candide by Voltaire
Ethics by Spinoza
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
Walden by Henry David Thoreau ★
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
essays
The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis
Notes of A Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler ★
The White Album by Joan Didion ★
I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
The Art of Fiction by Henry James
A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
Sexus by Henry Miller
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach ★
Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind
The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000 by Gore Vidal
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
history & historical true crime
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry ★
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ★
The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duffy
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh
The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ★
biography
Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, and Nikki Sixx
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume I: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 by William Manchester
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume II: Alone, 1932–1940 by William Manchester
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume III: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
plays
The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer ★
The Mourning Bride by William Congreve
The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
The Iliad by Homer
Hamlet by William Shakespeare ★
Macbeth by William Shakespeare ★
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part I by William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part II by William Shakespeare
Henry V by William Shakespeare
Henry VI by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare ★
Richard III by William Shakespeare ★
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams ★
poetry & letters
Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning ★
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos
New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson ★
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913–1965 by Dawn Powell
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke ★
The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton ★
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare ★
Letters of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman




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This is more important to me than the NYT 100 Books list
saw the title and ran here