I’ll admit it, I watch the Gilmore Girls every now and then. As much as I find the mother-daughter bond to be frightfully corny and boring, I still 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 and not just contemporary pop culture fads.
I’m not sure how complete or even accurate this list is for Rory’s book list, but I figure its a decent enough list to get one started reading. You can click on the hyperlinks to read my reviews of the book club titles I’ve read this year.
| 1984 | by George Orwell |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | by John Kennedy Toole |
| A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | by Dave Eggers |
| Mencken Chrestomathy | by H.L. Mencken |
| A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister | by Julie Mars |
| A Passage to India | by E.M. Forster |
| A Quiet Storm: A Novel | by Rachel Howzell Hall |
| A Room of One’s Own (Annotated) | by Virginia Woolf |
| A Separate Peace | by John Knowles |
| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (P.S.) | by Betty Smith |
| Dreiser American Tragedy (Library of America) | by Theodore Dreiser |
| Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club) | by Leo Tolstoy |
| Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl | by Anne Frank |
| Atonement: A Novel | by Ian McEwan |
| Autobiography of a Face | by Lucy Grealy |
| Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel | by Dai Sijie |
| Bee Season: A Novel | by Myla Goldberg |
| Bel Canto (P.S.) | by Ann Patchett |
| Beloved | by Toni Morrison |
| Beowulf: A New Verse Translation | |
| Brave New World | by Aldous Huxley |
| Brick Lane: A Novel | by Monica Ali |
| Catch-22 | by Joseph Heller |
| The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty | by Eudora Welty |
| Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems | by Edgar Allan Poe |
| Cousin Bette (Modern Library Classics) | by Honoré de Balzac |
| Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics) | by Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| Daisy Miller | by Henry James |
| David Copperfield (Penguin Classics) | by Charles Dickens |
| Dead Souls | by Nikolai Gogol |
| Death of a Salesman | by Arthur Miller |
| Demons (Everyman’s Library (Alfred a. Knopf, Inc.), 182) | by Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Bantam Classics) | by Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | by Blanche Wiesen Cook |
| Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable | by Mark Dunn |
| Emma (Penguin Classics) | by Jane Austen |
| Empire Falls (HBO Tie-in) | by Richard Russo |
| Ethan Frome (Enriched Classics) | by Edith Wharton |
| Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door 2007: The Travel Skills Handbook (Rick Steves) | by Rick Steves |
| Extravagance: A Novel | by Gary Krist |
| Fahrenheit 451: A Novel | by Ray Bradbury |
| Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World | by Greg Critser |
| Flowers for Algernon | by Daniel Keyes |
| Frankenstein (Enriched Classics) | by Mary Shelley |
| Franny and Zooey | by J.D. Salinger |
| Galapagos (Delta Fiction) | by Kurt Vonnegut |
| Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library) | by William Shakespeare |
| Heart of Darkness | by Joseph Conrad |
| Holidays on Ice: Stories | by David Sedaris |
| How the Light Gets in | by M. J. Hyland |
| How to Breathe Underwater | by Julie Orringer |
| Howl | by Allen Ginsberg |
| Inherit the Wind | by Jerome Lawrence |
| Jane Eyre (Signet Classics) | by Charlotte Brontë |
| Just a Couple of Days | by Tony Vigorito |
| Leaves of Grass (Enriched Classics) | by Walt Whitman |
| Letters to a Young Poet | by Rainer Maria Rilke |
| Life of Pi: Student Edition | by Yann Martel |
| Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics) | by Charles Dickens |
| Little Women (Signet Classics) | by Louisa May Alcott |
| Living History | by Hillary Rodham Clinton |
| Lord of the Flies : | by William Golding |
| Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics) | by Gustave Flaubert |
| Me Talk Pretty One Day | by David Sedaris |
| Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Perennial Classics) | by Simone de Beauvoir |
| Middlesex: A Novel | by Jeffrey Eugenides |
| Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) | by Herman Melville |
| Monsieur Proust (New York Review Books Classics) | by Celeste Albaret |
| Mrs. Dalloway | by Virginia Woolf |
| My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath | by Seymour M. Hersh |
| My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru | by Tim Guest |
| My Sister’s Keeper: A Novel | by Jodi Picoult |
| Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature | by Jan Lars Jensen |
| New Poems of Emily Dickinson | by Emily Dickinson |
| Night (Oprah’s Book Club) | by Elie Wiesel |
| Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 (Library of America) | by Dawn Powell |
| Of Mice and Men: (Centennial Edition) | by John Steinbeck |
| Old School | by Tobias Wolff |
| Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics) | by Charles Dickens |
| On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) | by Jack Kerouac |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: | by Ken Kesey |
| Oracle Night: A Novel | by Paul Auster |
| Oryx and Crake | by Margaret Atwood |
| Othello | by William Shakespeare |
| Out of Africa | by Isak Dinesen |
| Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk | by Legs McNeil |
| Property | by Valerie Martin |
| Pushkin: A Biography | by T.J. Binyon |
| Pygmalion (Dover Thrift Editions) | by George Bernard Shaw |
| Quattrocento | by James Mckean |
| Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books | by Azar Nafisi |
| Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad | by Virginia Holman |
| Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library) | by William Shakespeare |
| Rosemary’s Baby | by Ira Levin |
| Sacred Time : A Novel (Hegi, Ursula) | by Ursula Hegi |
| Sanctuary (A Modern Library Book) | by William Faulkner |
| Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay | by Nancy Milford |
| Seabiscuit: An American Legend | by LAURA HILLENBRAND |
| Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) | by Jane Austen |
| Siddhartha: Siddhartha (Shambhala Classics) | by Hermann Hesse |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | by Kurt Vonnegut |
| Small Island: A Novel | by Andrea Levy |
| The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner Classics) | by Ernest Hemingway |
| Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos | by Julia de Burgos |
| Songbook | by Nick Hornby |
| Speak, Memory (Everyman’s Library (Cloth)) | by Vladimir Nabokov |
| Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers | by Mary Roach |
| Swann’s Way (Modern Library Classics) | by Marcel Proust |
| Swimming With Giants: My Encounters With Whales, Dolphins, and Seals | by Anne Collet |
| Sybil | by Flora Rheta Schreiber |
| A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) | by Charles Dickens |
| Tender Is the Night | by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Modern Library Classics) | by Mark Twain |
| The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | by Michael Chabon |
| The Art of War (Shambhala Classics) | by Sun Tzu |
| The Awakening | by Kate Chopin |
| The Bell Jar | by Sylvia Plath |
| The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews | by Peter Duffy |
| The Catcher in the Rye | by J.D. Salinger |
| The Code of the Woosters | by P.G. Wodehouse |
| The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics) | by Alexandre Dumas père |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | by Mark Haddon |
| The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America | by Erik Larson |
| The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test | by Tom Wolfe |
| The Five People You Meet in Heaven | by Mitch Albom |
| The Fortress of Solitude | by Jonathan Lethem |
| The Fountainhead (Centennial Edition Hardcover) | by Ayn Rand |
| The God of Small Things | by Arundhati Roy |
| The Great Gatsby | by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Group | by Mary McCarthy |
| The Handmaid’s Tale (Everyman’s Library) | by Margaret Atwood |
| The Holy Barbarians | by lawrence lipton |
| The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics (Paperback)) | by Victor Hugo |
| The Jungle (Modern Library Classics) | by Upton Sinclair |
| The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar | by Robert Alexander |
| The Kite Runner (Riverhead Essential Editions) | by Khaled Hosseini |
| The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 | by Gore Vidal |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia) | by C. S. Lewis |
| The Little Locksmith: A Memoir | by Katharine Butler Hathaway |
| The Lottery: And Other Stories | by Shirley Jackson |
| The Lovely Bones | by Alice Sebold |
| The Manticore (Penguin Classics) | by Robertson Davies |
| The Master and Margarita | by Mikhail Bulgakov |
| The Meaning of Consuelo: A Novel (Bluestreak) | by Judith Ortiz Cofer |
| The Metamorphosis: | by Franz Kafka |
| The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition | by Norman Mailer |
| The Name of the Rose (Everyman’s Library (Cloth)) | by Umberto Eco |
| The Namesake (movie tie-in edition) | by Jhumpa Lahiri |
| The Nanny Diaries | by Emma McLaughlin |
| The Opposite of Fate | by Amy Tan |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | by Oscar Wilde |
| The Polysyllabic Spree | by Nick Hornby |
| The Portable Dorothy Parker (Viking Portable Library) | by Dorothy Parker |
| The Portable Nietzsche (Viking Portable Library) | |
| The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill | by Ron Suskind |
| The Razor’s Edge | by W. Somerset Maugham |
| The Red Tent | by Anita Diamant |
| The Rough Guide to Europe 2006 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) | by Various Authors |
| The Scarecrow of Oz | by L. Frank Baum |
| The Scarlet Letter (Modern Library Classics) | by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| The Second Sex (Everyman’s Library (Cloth)) | by Simone De Beauvoir |
| The Secret Life of Bees (Penguin Essential Edition) | by Sue Kidd |
| The Shadow of the Wind | by Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
| The Song of Names | by Norman Lebrecht |
| The Song Reader | by Lisa Tucker |
| The Sound and the Fury | by William Faulkner |
| The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition (Modern Library Classics) | by Helen Keller |
| Sun Also Rises (Scribner Classics) | by Ernest Hemingway |
| The Time Traveler’s Wife | by Audrey Niffenegger |
| The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters: A Novel | by Elisabeth Robinson |
| Unabridged Journals | by Sylvia Plath |
| The Year of Magical Thinking | by Joan Didion |
| Time and Again | by Jack Finney |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | by Harper Lee |
| Truth & Beauty: A Friendship | by Ann Patchett |
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Thrift Edition) | by Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| Unless: A Novel (P.S.) | by Carol Shields |
| Vanity Fair (Penguin Classics) | by William Makepeace Thackeray |
| War and Peace (Oxford World’s Classics) | by Leo Tolstoy |
| When the Emperor Was Divine | by Julie Otsuka |
| Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | by Edward Albee |
| Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West | by Gregory Maguire |
| Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel | by Rebecca Wells |
