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    1. Culture
    2. TV shows

    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

    By Mehera Bonner
    Published 5 February 2016 In News

    When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

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    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. 

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    1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

    2. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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    3. Emma by Jane Austen

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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.

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