Every Single Book on The Rory Gilmore Reading List

Published by Esther Fung, July 3, 2024


Of all the readers that have appeared on our screens, Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls is one of the most iconic.


The teenage daughter of a single mother in her 30s, Rory, played by Alexis Bledel, says that she lives in a "world of books," a claim echoed by book-loving fans everywhere. However, she's not the only reader in this quirky television series. The show is replete with bookworms, from her mother, Lorelai Gilmore, to her frenemy, Paris Geller. In fact, over the course of seven seasons and a miniseries revival, there are over 400 references to books and authors, an impressive tidbit of trivia that has led to the creation of the Rory Gilmore Reading List.


Here, we'll discuss exactly what the Rory Gilmore Reading List and Reading Challenge are, as well as give you a list of every single book on that list. Fans who are trying to complete the challenge, make sure you save this page for future reference!

What is the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge?

The Rory Gilmore Reading List, compiled by hardcore fans of the show, is a comprehensive list of every book referenced by any character or episode name in Gilmore Girls. The astounding range in the Rory Gilmore Reading List, which includes everything from classics like Anna Karenina to young adult bestsellers like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is a testament to show runner Amy Sherman-Palladino's diverse reading habits.


Taking fandom one step further, the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge is an initiative to read all the books on the Rory Gilmore Reading List. Some participants have a more casual approach, incorporating the mentioned books into their regular reading habits and working through the list at their own pace. Others are more structured. These readers set specific progress goals for themselves, use social media or book trackers to log their progress through the list, and even join book clubs with other Gilmore Girls fans.


Regardless of which approach you're taking, here are all the books you'll be reading in order to complete this challenge and earn your badge as a Gilmore Girls superfan.

Classics on the Rory Gilmore Reading List

  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  4. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
  5. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
  6. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
  7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  8. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  9. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  10. The Awakening by Kate Chopin 
  11. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
  12. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  15. Candide by Voltaire
  16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  17. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  18. The Celebrated Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
  19. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  20. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  21. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
  22. The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
  23. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
  24. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  25. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
  26. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  27. Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac
  28. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  29. Daisy Miller by Henry James
  30. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  31. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
  32. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  33. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  34. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  35. Emma by Jane Austen
  36. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
  37. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  38. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
  39. Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
  40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  41. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
  42. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
  43. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
  44. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  45. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
  46. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  47. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  48. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  49. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  50. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
  51. Indiana by George Sand
  52. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  53. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
  54. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  55. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
  56. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
  57. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  58. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  59. The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
  60. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  61. The Manticore by Robertson Davies
  62. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  63. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  64. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  65. Molloy by Samuel Beckett
  66. The Mourning Bride by William Congreve
  67. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  68. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
  69. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  70. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
  71. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
  72. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  73. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
  74. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  75. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  76. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  77. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  78. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  79. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
  80. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  81. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  82. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  83. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
  84. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  85. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  86. The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
  87. Roman Fever by Edith Wharton
  88. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
  89. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
  90. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
  91. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  92. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  93. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  94. Sexus by Henry Miller
  95. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  96. Shane by Jack Shaefer
  97. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  98. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  99. The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
  100. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
  101. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  102. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  103. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
  104. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  105. In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
  106. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  107. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  108. Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
  109. The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
  110. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
  111. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  112. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
  113. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  114. Ulysses by James Joyce
  115. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  116. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  117. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  118. Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac
  119. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  120. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
  121. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  122. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Nonfiction on the Rory Gilmore Reading List

  1. All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
  2. The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
  3. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as a History by Norman Mailer
  4. The Art of Fiction by Henry James
  5. The Art of Living by Epictetus
  6. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
  7. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
  8. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
  9. The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy
  10. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
  11. A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
  12. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
  13. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
  14. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
  15. The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, and Nikki Sixx
  16. Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
  17. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
  18. Ethics by Spinoza
  19. Europe through the Back Door: The Travel Skills Handbook by Rick Steves
  20. The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader by Michael Moore
  21. The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
  22. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
  23. Fodor’s Selected Hotels of Europe
  24. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
  25. George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
  26. A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
  27. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
  28. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  29. Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson
  30. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry
  31. He’s Just Not That into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
  32. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
  33. The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
  34. I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron
  35. I’m with the Band by Pamela Des Barres
  36. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  37. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
  38. It Takes A Village by Hillary Clinton
  39. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
  40. The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000 by Gore Vidal
  41. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume I: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 by William Manchester
  42. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume II: Alone, 1932–1940 by William Manchester
  43. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume III: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester
  44. Letters of Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand
  45. Letters of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton
  46. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
  47. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
  48. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
  49. Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin
  50. The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
  51. Living History by Hillary Clinton
  52. Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
  53. Memoirs of General William T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
  54. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
  55. A Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken
  56. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
  57. The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time by Jim Irvin
  58. Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
  59. A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
  60. Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret
  61. A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars
  62. Motley Crue by Seamus Craic
  63. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
  64. Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
  65. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh
  66. My Life as Author and Editor by H.L. Mencken
  67. My Life in Orange: Growing up with the Guru by Tim Guest
  68. Myra Waldo’s Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe by Myra Waldo
  69. My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
  70. Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
  71. The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
  72. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  73. Night by Elie Wiesel
  74. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, et al.
  75. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of A Writing Life by Amy Tan
  76. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
  77. Out of Africa by Isak Dineson
  78. The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
  79. Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
  80. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
  81. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
  82. The Portable Nietzsche by Fredrich Nietzsche
  83. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind  
  84. Primary Colors by Joe Klein
  85. The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe
  86. Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon
  87. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
  88. Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
  89. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem by Gloria Steinem
  90. Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry M. Robert
  91. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  92. The Rough Guide to Europe on a Budget
  93. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
  94. Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
  95. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
  96. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
  97. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913–1965 by Dawn Powell
  98. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
  99. Songbook by Nick Hornby
  100. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
  101. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  102. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
  103. Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collet
  104. Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
  105. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
  106. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
  107. The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age by Philip Meyer
  108. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
  109. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  110. We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews by Daniel Sinker
  111. What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles
  112. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
  113. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
  114. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  115. Yoga for Dummies by Georg Feuerstein and Larry Payne
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Poems and plays on the Rory Gilmore Reading List

  1. Beowulf
  2. The Bhagavad Gita 
  3. Brigadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
  4. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  5. A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
  6. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton by Anne Sexton
  7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
  8. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
  9. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
  10. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  11. Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
  12. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
  13. Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
  14. Haiku, Volume 2: Spring by R.H. Blyth
  15. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  16. Henry IV, Part I by William Shakespeare
  17. Henry IV, Part II by William Shakespeare
  18. Henry V by William Shakespeare
  19. Henry VI by William Shakespeare
  20. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
  21. The Iliad by Homer
  22. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri 
  23. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
  24. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  25. The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus
  26. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
  27. The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
  28. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
  29. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
  30. New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
  31. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
  32. Othello by William Shakespeare
  33. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
  34. Richard III by William Shakespeare
  35. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
  36. Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos
  37. Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  38. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
  39. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  40. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
  41. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

Other books on the Rory Gilmore Reading List

  1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
  2. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 
  3. Brick Lane by Mónica Ali
  4. Carrie by Stephen King
  5. The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
  6. Christine by Stephen King
  7. The Complete Novels of Dawn Powell by Dawn Powell
  8. Contact by Carl Sagan
  9. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
  10. Cujo by Stephen King
  11. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
  12. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
  13. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  14. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
  15. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
  16. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
  17. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
  18. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  19. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
  20. Extravagance by Gary Krist
  21. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  22. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
  23. Fletch by Gregory McDonald
  24. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  25. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
  26. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  27. Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
  28. Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
  29. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
  30. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  31. Goodnight Spoon by Keith Richards
  32. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
  33. The Graduate by Charles Webb
  34. The Group by Mary McCarthy
  35. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
  36. Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
  37. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
  38. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
  39. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
  40. How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
  41. Ironweed by William Kennedy
  42. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
  43. Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
  44. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
  45. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  46. The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
  47. Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
  48. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  49. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
  50. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
  51. Love Story by Erich Segal
  52. Marathon Man by William Goldman
  53. The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
  54. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  55. Misery by Stephen King
  56. Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt
  57. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
  58. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  59. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  60. The Nanny Diaries by Emma Mclaughlin
  61. Notes of A Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
  62. Old School by Tobias Wolff
  63. Oracle Night by Paul Auster
  64. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
  65. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  66. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
  67. Property by Valerie Martin
  68. The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels by Nancy Mitford
  69. Quattrocento by James McKean
  70. A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
  71. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
  72. R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
  73. Rita Hayworth by Stephen King
  74. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
  75. Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
  76. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  77. The Shining by Stephen King
  78. S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton
  79. Small Island by Andrea Levy
  80. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
  81. The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
  82. The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
  83. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
  84. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
  85. Summer of Fear by T. Jefferson Parker
  86. Tevya the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem
  87. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy 
  88. Time and Again by Jack Finney
  89. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  90. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
  91. The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
  92. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
  93. Unless by Carol Shields
  94. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
  95. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
  96. What Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell
  97. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
  98. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire