Read along with the Gilmore Girls: A look at books that featured in the series

When the protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore, visits the English teacher Mr. Medina, she looks at his bookshelf and comments how she wishes she could quote Proust someday. He insists that she borrow his copy. This gesture soon becomes symbolic of their relationship, as later on in the series, she decides to return the book and end the relationship. A 20th Century masterpiece, the book reflects on the nature of love, when the narrator revisits his past and remembers his childhood as well as his friend Charlie Swann’s love affair with a woman named Odette.

Season 2: Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

When diner-owner Luke Danes’s nephew meets Rory Gilmore for the first time, he runs his eyes over her bookshelf and picks up a copy of the Beat poet’s book-length poem. Later, having snuck her copy, he returns it to her with notes in the margins. This marks the beginning of their friendship. Incidentally, Ginsberg’s reading of the poem, dedicated to fellow writer Carl Solomon, became a defining moment in American literary history. The poem celebrates those on the peripheries, and comments on the death of humanity and the rise of money-making obscenity.

Season 3: The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Members of the Poe society lodge in at the Independence Inn, run by Lorelai Gilmore. Two of them prepare a recitation of the famous poem. The townspeople go on to sit through both their recitations to “compare and contrast”. In Poe’s iconic work, a lover, lamenting the loss of his beloved, reads forgotten folklore to deal with grief, when he is paid a visit by a raven. Despite the raven’s stock response to everything — the word ‘Nevermore!’— he continues to ask questions of the avian visitor.

Season 4: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

This season is full of literary references, Hemingway being a popular one. His novel becomes a talking point for Rory and her classmate Trevor. They support each other’s statements about the protagonist of the novel during a lecture, and catch up later. Hemingway’s debut novel is set in the 1920s Paris, and looks at the life of an American expatriate in the city, as he searches for integrity in a world corrupted by wealthy expatriates.

Season  5: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

In an episode titled ‘Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant!’, the author makes a cameo appearance. He orders “nothing but iced tea” at the Dragonfly Inn, much to the annoyance of the talented chef Sookie St. James. Meanwhile, Lorelai celebrates the author’s visit. In his debut novel, Mailer draws from his own experiences as a cook during World War II. The book is set in the South Pacific, where an army platoon fights for the possession of the Japanese-held fictional island of Anopopei.

Season  6: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Rory Gilmore reads Didion

During Valentine’s week, Rory carries Didion’s memoir to Martha’s Vineyard. She is spotted on the couch, reading the book. It’s an interesting choice of a book for a weekend with others because while her stay is supposed to be relaxing and fun, the book is not a light vacation read at all. It is Didion’s most personal meditative prose, written from a place of grief, after having lost her after having lost her husband John Gregory Dunne.

Season 7: Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

Rory has a new economics teacher at Yale, after her grandfather, who previously taught the subject, suffers a heart attack. Rory and the teacher strike up a conversation at the library. When she sees him pick up Eva Luna, she calls the book Allende’s best work, contrary to popular opinion. Most consider The House of the Spirits her best, she tells him. Eva Luna traces the life of an orphan, who grows up poor in South America, but is a storehouse of fascinating stories, which she narrates to kind people.

Also check out

>> The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
>> Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
>> Ulysses by James Joyce
>> Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
>> Charlotte’s Web by EB White
>> The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

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