Now That 'Gilmore Girls' Is Coming Back, Let's Revisit Rory's Reading List

"We could go to a bookstore!" = only smart thing Dean's ever said

Woman and man reviewing a book
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Much like Gilmore Girls is nothing without its rapid-fire pop culture references, Rory is nothing without her trusty booklist. Whether she's poring through Joan Didion or eye-rolling at Jess Mariano mansplaining Howl, Rory is literally never without a novel. 

Seriously, guys, this was her graduation speech: "I've been a resident of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann's Way."

So yeah, girl is obsessed with reading. A whopping 339 books appear throughout the course of Gilmore Girls' seven seasons, and literature is so central to Rory's character in particular that The WB (may it rest in peace) provided fans with her reading list. Due to the fact that she's the coolest teen ever, Rory's list spans everything from Bel Canto to The Bell Jar, and we're revisiting it below. 

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

2. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

3. Emma by Jane Austen

4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

5. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

6. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

7. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

8. Wicked by Gregory Maguire

9. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

10. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

11. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

12. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

13. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

14. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

15. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

16. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

17. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

18. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

19. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

20. Night by Elie Wiesel

Woman on phone and reading newspaper

My books look sad.  Can books look sad?

(Image credit: Giphy)

21. Hamlet by Shakespeare

22. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

23. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

24. Flowers for Algernon by Keyes

25. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

26. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

27. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

28. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

29. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

30. 1984 by George Orwell

31. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

35. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

36. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

37. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

38. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

39. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

40. The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

Guy and girl discussing a book

Its a cool book, you've gotta admit.

(Image credit: Giphy)

41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

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

43. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

44. Beloved by Toni Morrison

45. Unless by Carol Shields

46. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

47. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

48. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

49. Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

50. Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

52. Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut

53. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

54.The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

55. Brick Lane by Monica Ali

56. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

57. Oracle Night by Paul Auster

58. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

59. The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

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

Woman looking at books

Oh, do you see the books?

(Image credit: Giphy)

61. The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duffy

62. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

63. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

64. Bee Season by Myla Goldberg

65. My Life in Orange by Tim Guest

66. Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi

67. Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand

68. Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman

69. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

70. Songbook by Nick Hornby

71. A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

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

73. Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Jensen

74. Extravagance by Gary Krist

75. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

76. The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht

77. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

78. Small Island by Andrea Levy

79. A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars

80. Property by Valerie Martin

Woman thinking about the smell of a book

Nothing, nothing smells like that

(Image credit: Giphy)

81. Quattrocento by James McKean

82. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

83. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

84. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

85. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

86. Stiff by Mary Roach

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

88. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

89. Empire Falls by Richard Russo

90. The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan

91. Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

92. Old School by Tobias Wolff

93. Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac

94. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

95. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

96. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

97. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

98. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

99. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

100. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Man looking at book

(Image credit: Giphy)

101. Time and Again by Jack Finney

102. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

103. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

104. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

105. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

106. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

107. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

108. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

109. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

110. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

111. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

112.The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

113. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

114. Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

115. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

116. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

117. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe

118. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

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

Guy reading a book

(Image credit: Giphy)

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Mehera Bonner
Entertainment Editor

Mehera Bonner is a celebrity and entertainment news writer who enjoys Bravo and Antiques Roadshow with equal enthusiasm. She was previously entertainment editor at Marie Claire and has covered pop culture for over a decade.