What’s on Rory Gilmore’s Bookshelf?

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Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls has always been my guru. Her wit, intelligence, never-ending appetite, feminist outlook, and multi-dimensional plot lines are a rare combination of characteristics for female leads to possess within today’s pop culture. Likewise, there were few episodes of Gilmore Girls where Rory wasn’t reading a book, referencing a book, or standing with a stack of her prized books—her thirst for knowledge was a key part of who she was.

Filmmaker John Waters once said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.” I, too, believe that books can tell a lot about a person. If I went over to a guy’s house and he only had books about money or cars, this would be the tarot card to tell me that our interests probably don’t align.   

So with that in mind, I’ve always wanted to know more about the novels Rory read. Which of her books were reading material for her days at Chilton Preparatory School, and which did she choose on her own? And why did the writers of the show put these specific novels on her bookshelf? Did they reflect a certain plot point/characteristic of Rory or were they completely randomized? While I don’t have the answers to these questions, a new discovery has been made. The WB had Rory’s Book Club on their website a while back; however, it was unfortunately taken down when WB was defunct. But now,  a Tumblr recently compiled the full list of books Rory indulges in throughout the series, and has again been posted online. 

Challenge: See if you can read them all by the end of the summer. Check out the full list below and share your favorite Rory reading moments in the comments:

• A Month Of Sundays by Julie Mars

• The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham         

• Small Island by Andrea Levy  

• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult  

• A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall  

• My Life in Orange by Tim Guest  

• Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett  

• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon  

• The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby  

• How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer  

• The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson  

• Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen  

• The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer  

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini  

• How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland  

• Oracle Night by Paul Auster  

• Quattrocento by James McKean  

• The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan  

• Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris  

• Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi  

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach  

• The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom  

• The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem  

• Old School by Tobias Wolff  

• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri  

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon  

• The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duff  

• Brick Lane by Monica Ali  

• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger  

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood  

• The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht  

• Property by Valerie Martin  

• Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman  

• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson  

• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie  

• The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander  

• Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito  

• Bee Season by Myla Goldberg  

• Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser  

• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire  

• Unless by Carol Shields  

• Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy  

• When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka  

• Songbook by Nick Hornby  

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides  

• Extravagance by Gary Krist  

• Empire Falls by Richard Russo  

• The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker  

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett  

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole  

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon  

• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris  

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel  

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy  

• The Red Tent by Anita Diamant  

• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd  

• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold  

• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn  

• Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand  

• The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus                 

• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster  

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  

• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton  

• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse  

• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov  

• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco  

• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens  

• The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson  

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott  

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey  

• Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos  

• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne  

• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray  

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury  

• The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  

• Night by Elie Wiesel  

• The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse  

• Hamlet by William Shakespeare  

• Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe  

• Beloved by Toni Morrison  

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith  

• A Separate Peace by John Knowles  

• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw  

• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes  

• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller  

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin  

• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank  

• Time and Again by Jack Finney  

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley  

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas  

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe  

• Sybil by Flora Schreiber  

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson  

• Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac  

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad  

• Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut  

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov  

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair  

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck  

• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen  

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo  

• 1984 by George Orwell  

• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker  

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway  

• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser  

• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller  

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky  

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding  

• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger  

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald  

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte  

• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath  

• The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner  

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka  

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain  

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy  

• Emma by Jane Austen  

• On The Road by Jack Kerouac  

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand