If you’ve ever seen Gilmore Girls, there’s a pretty good chance you know that Rory Gilmore is as big a bookworm as they come — maybe that’s why we’ve always liked her so much. Recently, we stumbled on this exhaustive list of all the books Rory has read, and after we caught our breath (there’s some two hundred and fifty books on there!) we decided to compile a few more of the books we’ve noticed some of our favorite fictional characters reading — so as to follow along, of course. Click through to see what books Don Draper, Margot Tenanbaum, and Daria Morgendorffer have been occupying themselves with recently, and let us know if we’ve missed your favorite fictional bookworm in the comments!
Rory Gilmore, Gilmore Girls
Rory reads everything, from contemporary literature to criticism to biographies to classics. She’s probably the most literate person we feel like we know. Just a sampling:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Beloved by Toni Morrison The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Finnegans Wake by James Joyce Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri Old School by Tobias Wolff Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Margot Tenenbaum, The Royal Tenenbaums
Obviously, Margot is a bit ahead of her time, and, being a playwright herself, has a particular penchant for drama.
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill The Sharks of North American Waters by Jose I. Castro A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen Plays by George Bernard Shaw
Daria Morgendorffer, Daria
Another avid reader, with more than a slight leaning towards the dark side — see a bigger list here.
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy Fifth Business by Robertson Davies As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Moby Dick by Herman Melville Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Don Draper, Mad Men
We don’t exactly think of Don as an intellectual, but he definitely reads more than anyone else on Mad Men — or maybe that’s just because we spend the most time with him. Either way, he always has a stolidly masculine book by his side.
Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara Odds Against by Dick Francis The Berlitz Self-Teacher: French The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict Exodus by Leon Uris The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe The Fixer by Bernard Malamud The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carré
Matilda Wormwood, Matilda
After Matilda whets her palate on The Secret Garden and Great Expectations, Roald Dahl lays it out for us.
“Over the next six months, under Mrs. Phelps watchful and compassionate eye, Matilda read the following books:”
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Gone to Earth by Mary Webb Kim by Rudyard Kipling The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Animal Farm by George Orwell
She also reads: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
And, if the film is to be believed, Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons
Imagine turning all these pages with so few fingers.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro The Harry Potter series The Rise and Fall of the Third Riech by William L. Shirer Moneyball by Michael Lewis The Adventures of Tintin, Hergé Ghost World, Daniel Clowes The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen A Separate Peace, John Knowles
See the full list (so far) over at the Lisa Simpson Book Club.
Stewie Griffin, Family Guy
The reading list of a true overlord.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (obviously) The Art Of War by Sun Tzu (obviously) The Bible
Sawyer, Lost
No matter how much of a grown up you are, we bet if you were stranded on an island, you’d eventually pick up Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret too. Admit it.
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares Lancelot by Walker Percy Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Watership Down by Richard Adams The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie
Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
If you were trapped on a flying tin can for seven seasons, which two books would you bring? We think Picard has the right of it.
Ulysses by James Joyce Every Shakespeare play ever, considering that he always (yes, the book appears in all 7 seasons) has his copy of The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works by Howard Staunton open to a different page.
Lucas Scott, One Tree Hill
This is just the perfect semi-outsider, semi-tortured, semi-intellectual high school reading list.
The Winter Of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Call of the Wild by Jack London Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle