Quick Hit: Rory Gilmore’s Bookshelf

Ashley
Books
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If you are even remotely close to my age (i.e. pushing 30), you probably know a little bit about the Gilmore Girls. If you know even a little about the Gilmore Girls, you know that Rory – my teenage idol – always had a book with her. Literally, at all times. This girl made it cool to bust a paperback out of your purse at a boring party. She also, obviously, made it cool to care purses big enough to fit your book.

So what was she reading all that time, you ask? Well, now there is a Tumblr that will tell you! Check it out.

BUST Magazine’s website just ran an article on it, and listed all the books. I’ve included the list below, and the titles in bold are the one’s I’ve read. Warning: It’s a pathetically small amount.

• 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 – BONUS! I’ve taught a chapter of this one

• 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  – BONUS! I’ve taught “The Lottery,” too

• 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  – BONUS! I’ve taught some of this one, too.

• 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

This brings my grand total to 29. I suppose that’s not too bad, when you think about it.

How many have you read on this list? Any you think should be added?

Photo Credit: a book diary

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12 replies on “Quick Hit: Rory Gilmore’s Bookshelf”

  1. veronica on

    14…although some I read a long time ago. And I can’t remember if I actually finished a few of them. ha!

    • Ashley on

      Veronica – I’d say 14 is pretty good! I also can’t remember if I finished a few of the ones I marked, either, but I figured if I can reference them in a discussion on literature, I’m good. 🙂

      I’d also venture to say that a lot of the books she read weren’t very interesting…

  2. Véronique on

    Twenty-three for me, if I’m counting correctly. And interestingly, only a few intersect with your list. Oryx and Crake is great, although the second in the series, The Year of the Flood, is even more wonderful. And I highly recommend The Red Tent.

    • Ashley on

      Veronique – 23 is a good number! I, too, was surprised to see which books she had on her list. It seems like all the great authors are more or less represented, but didn’t she ever read anything fun at the beach?! And why Oryx and Crake over, say, The Handmaid’s Tale? Interesting choices, to be sure.

  3. Sara M. on

    32. I’d be interested to see your feminist review of The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s one of my favorite books and a love story that touched me so deeply that I spent three days crying at random moments over it! Truth and Beauty is a beautiful friendship story about two women writers. I think you’d enjoy it. How are you getting settled into the new house?

  4. Véronique on

    I agree with Sara M about The Time Traveler’s Wife. I’m not quite sure why it touched me so deeply, but it did. I have wanted to try the film, but I’m afraid to, because I love the book so much.

    The Red Tent, just so you know, is a fictional account of Dinah, only daughter of the patriarch Jacob, whose story in the Bible is particularly horrendous. In the book, Dinah gets to tell her side. I found that one strangely moving too.

    • Sara M. on

      The movie is awful. They did the unthinkable and unforgivable and changed the ending. Should you end up watching it, don’t go in hoping it will touch you anywhere near as deeply as the book. In fact, you should probably just expect to be disappointed and maybe it will turn out better than you thought.

      • Ashley on

        Sara!!! How awesome that you still read this! I haven’t heard from you in a while – I hope all is well!

        I have not read The Time Traveler’s Wife. I made the egregious error of seeing the movie before reading the book and, well, I now have no desire to read the book at all. If several people I respect a great deal say it’s fantastic, though, maybe I should give it a try. I’m in the middle of The Night Circus right now, so maybe when I’m done with that, I’ll pick it up!

  5. Emily on

    21 for me! I have a ton of the others on my shelf though in my ‘to read’ pile. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of my absolute favorites on this list.

    • Ashley on

      21 is awesome! I’ve never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – obviously from this list. I’ll have to check it out.

  6. Susan Malter on

    38. I would add HenryJames’s Portrait of a Lady, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. I love this list. Thank you for posting it.