Reading like Rory Gilmore

“I live in two worlds. One is a world of books." - Rory Gilmore

I have lived a very parallel life to Rory in many ways, and one of them is my obsession with reading. I went to university and studied English Lit, and Russian, so the majority of my college career looked a lot like this gif of Rory reading on the bench. So, since I have read many of the books Rory introduces in the series I thought it would be fun for today's post to list all of the books that Rory says she has read!

*This includes books that were seen in different scenes and books just alluded to*

I am going to break down the books mentioned in this series by season rather than alphabetically! This allows you to be able to take on the Rory Gilmore reading challenge with a little bit more of a game plan rather than just looking at the massive list of books.

Season 1;

1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

3. Madame Bovary by Flaubert

4. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

7. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

9. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

11. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

12. A Mencken Chrestomathy by H.R. Mencken

13. My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken

14. Shakespeare’s Sonnets

15. The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare

16. Richard III by Shakespeare

17. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

18. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

19. Metamorphoses by Franz Kafka

20. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

21. New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

22. Unabridged Journal of Sylvia Plath

23. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tenessee Williams

24. The Compact English Dictionary

25. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

26. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

27. Ulysses by James Joyce

28. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen

29. The Art of Fiction by David Lodge

Season 2;

1. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

2. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman

3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

4. Who Moved my Cheese? by Spencer Johnson

5. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

6. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

7. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8. Howl by Allen Ginsberg

9. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

10. The Iliad by Homer

11. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

12. Gustave Flaubert

13. Summer of Fear by T Jefferson Parker

14. The Scarecrow of Oz by L Frank Baum

15. Contact by Carl Sagan

16. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

17. The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

18. The Mourning Bride by William Congreve

19. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee

20. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

21. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

22. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

23. Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

24. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Season 3;

1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

2. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Eloise at the Plaza by Kay Thompson

5. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

6. Europe Through the Back Door by Rick Steves

7. Rough Guide to Europe by various authors

8. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

9. The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

10. Othello by William Shakespeare

11. I’m with the Band by Pamela Des Barres

12. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

13. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

15. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

16. James Bondby Ian Fleming

17. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

18. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

19. Henry VI by William Shakespeare

20. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

21. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

22. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Season 4;

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan

2. Haiku (Volume 2) Spring by R.H. Blyth

3. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

4. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

5. The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

6. Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

8. Hans Christian Andersen

9. 1984 by George Orwell

10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

11. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

12. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

14. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

15. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

16. Richard III by Shakespeare

17. Macbeth by Shakespeare

18. The Trial by Franz Kafka

19. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Season 5;

1. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

2. Daisy Miller by Henry James

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

4. The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

6. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

7. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

8. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

9. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as a History by Norman Mailer

10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

11. A Girl from Yamhill by a Beverly Cleary

12. Like Water for Chocolate trans. Carol and Thomas Christenson by Laura Esquivel

13. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

14. Yoga for Dummies by Georg Feuerstein and Larry Payne

15. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

16. The Nancy Drew Series by Carolyn Keene

17. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

18. Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

19. He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

20. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

21. Ethics by Spinoza

22. The Illiad by Homer

Season 6;

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

2. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

4. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

5. The Prodigal Daughter Returns

6. Primary Colors by Joe Klein

7. Beowulf

8. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

10. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

11. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

12. Charlotte’s Web by Roald Dahl

13. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Season 7;

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

2. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

3. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

4. Sexus by Henry Miller

5. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

6. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

7. House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

8. The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyer

9. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

10. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

11. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

12. Robert’s Rules of Order by General Henry M Robert

Here are a few that others have mentioned that Rory read, but I did not catch as a direct reference;

1. Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

3. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

How many of these books have you read?