The Gilmore Girls Reading List

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Dean first notices Rory because she was so immersed in reading Madame Bovary that she misses a raucous scene happening right in front of her. Could this be Amy Sherman-Palladino warning the audience that Dean isn’t right for Rory (#TeamJess)?

In this influential extended essay, Virginia Woolf outlined what women need in order to fully make use of their abilities. Using powerful images and memorable thought experiments — such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not — Woolf analyzes the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time. A Room of One’s Own has been a towering and inspirational statement of feminist principles for nearly a century — and remains relevant now, at a time of growing awareness of the kind of social injustices that it decried.

Sylvia Plath is a figure that is mentioned several times throughout Gilmore Girls. Plath’s journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet’s personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons.

Tolstoy’s epic novel of love, destiny, and self-destruction. Anna Karenina seems to have everything — beauty, wealth, popularity, and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake.

Dorothy Parker is a huge inspiration for Amy Sherman-Palladino. Her production company is called “Dorothy Parker Drank Here,” and this was the book that Rory brought with her to the school dance when she and Dean fell asleep at Miss Patty’s. This sublime collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century’s most quotable authors.

Clyde Griffiths finds his social-climbing aspirations and love for a rich and beautiful debutante threatened when his lower-class pregnant girlfriend gives him an ultimatum.

The most famous day in literature is June 16, 1904, when a certain Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, admires a girl on the beach, contemplates his wife’s imminent adultery, and, late at night, befriends a drunken young poet in the city’s red-light district. An earthy story, a virtuoso technical display, and a literary revolution all rolled into one, James Joyce’s Ulysses is a touchstone of our modernity and one of the towering achievements of the human mind.

A dazzling biography of the French literary superstar Colette. Judith Thurman portrays Colette as a thoroughly modern woman: Frank in her desires, fierce in her passions, forever reinventing herself. Rich with delicious gossip and intimate revelations, shimmering with grace and intelligence, Secrets of the Flesh is one of the great biographies of our time.

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway — a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. The book is often compared with Ulysses, another modernist novel that takes place on a single day in June.

At the Bid-on-a-Basket fundraiser, Jess outbids Dean for the chance to go on a picnic lunch date with Rory. During the lunch Rory recommends that Jess read The Fountainhead, and in exchange she promises to give “the painful Ernest Hemingway another chance.” This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy, and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction — that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress …

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke’s letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort.

Shakespeare shines a fierce spotlight on the jealous heart and on our attitudes toward the outsider. A story of its time and for our time, full of terror and beauty, Othello is urgent, gripping, radical, and beautiful. Othello appears a couple of times in Season 2. When Rory tries to help tutor Jess, she has trouble motivating Jess to focus. He promises that if they go get ice cream he will study and Rory offers to read Othello to Jess, right before he crashes her car. Then later that season, Lane realizes that Dave Rygalski is “cute jealous” when he runs over a mile to see Lane at the hockey game. Rory reminds Lane that “there’s cute jealous, and then there’s Othello.”

Swann’s Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: A sensitive boy’s impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by a taste of a madeleine. The first volume of In Search of Lost Time established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age — satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition — Swann’s Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past recreated through memory. Swann’s Way is the book that Max Medina lets Lorelai borrow during their on-again-off-again relationship. Rory said when she read it, she had to check it out from the library 10 times!

Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, this bestselling “tour de force” (The New York Times) from the Booker Prize-winning author is a profound — and profoundly moving — exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: Flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works.

A modern classic — both poignant and funny — about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor’s dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. Rory is seen reading this book when Logan appears in her window to offer her “a proper goodnight” after the dinner at the Chinese restaurant.

In 1855, an unknown but wildly ambitious young poet self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, consisting of twelve untitled poems. Walt Whitman spent the rest of his life engaged in expanding and revising this work, through six editions and nearly four decades, establishing Leaves of Grass as one of the central works in the history of world poetry. After he and Emily return from their second honeymoon, Richard gives Rory a hundred-year-old copy of Leaves of Grass in Greek!

Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life — in good times and bad — that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief” (The New York Times).

The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.