A Cheater’s Guide to the Ultimate ‘Gilmore Girls’ Reading List

Where the Gilmore Girls lead, we will follow! It’s been nine long years since super mother-daughter duo Lorelai and Rory Gilmore drank all the coffee in Stars Hollow, gorged on junk food and Chinese takeout, fell in and out of love, and dropped every pop culture reference imaginable in their rapid-fire banter. Now the Gilmores are back to drink even more coffee, talk even faster, and charm us more than ever in Netflix’s continuation of the series, which premieres Nov. 25.

In four 90-minute episodes, titled “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall,” Lorelai (Lauren Graham), Rory (Alexis Bledel), and grandmother Emily (Kelly Bishop) all face big changes in their lives. To get ready for the revival, we’re highlighting all the things we love about the show with our official Return to Stars Hollow coverage, from the wacky supporting characters to the insanely clever dialogue to the girls’ complicated love lives. Check back here every day until Nov. 25 to obsess with us over all things Gilmore.

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Tackling the list of every book every referenced in the Gilmore Girls series — more than 300 — is a daunting task. You could be forgiven for feeling like Rory on her first visit to Harvard. The massive 13-million-volume library reduces her to a quivering mass of anxiety. “I’ve read like, what, 300 books in my entire life and I’m already 16?”

Take heart, constant reader. We’ve broken down the complete list for you so that you can take it in normal, people-sized bites. Feel like tackling the Russians? Go to that section. Looking for some light beach reading? That’s in there too.

American Classics

Rory had her 12th birthday party at the Mark Twain Museum, so it’s safe to say that, despite her love for the Russians, there’s a real soft spot there for American literature.

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
3. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
8. Complete Novels by Dawn Powell
9. Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
10. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
11. Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
12. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
13. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
14. Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
15. The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo
16. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
17. The Graduate by Charles Webb
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches by Mark Twain
21. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
22. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The notoriously pugnacious author initially refused an offer to be a guest star on the show, but softened when they said they wanted his son, Stephen, as well. It may not sound like much, but when he told New York magazine that he found the show “kind of agreeable,” it’s hard to imagine any higher praise.

23. Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
24. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
25. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
26. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
27. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
28. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
29. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
30. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
31. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
32. The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
35. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
36. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
37. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
38. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
39. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
40. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
41. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell

The Bard

Eleven of Shakespeare’s works (plus the sonnets, listed elsewhere) are mentioned on the show. However, Rory is seen working on a Complete Works, so it’s safe to assume she’s read all 37.

1. A Comedy of Errors
2. Hamlet
3. Henry IV, part I
4. Henry IV, part II
5. Henry V
6. Julius Caesar
7. Macbeth
8. The Merry Wives of Windsor
9. Othello
10. Romeo and Juliet
11. The Tragedy of Richard III

Books About Music

Helpful hint: If it’s about punk, it belongs to Jess. If it’s tell-all biographies about ’80s rock bands, it’s Lorelai’s.

1. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
2. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
3. We Owe You Nothing — Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker
4. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
5. I’m With the Band by Pamela des Barres
6. The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin
7. The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx
8. Songbook by Nick Hornby

Books for Surly Adolescents

Along with “turn on, tune in, drop out,” this is basically all you need to turn a young child into Jess. Well, that and Jane Austen.

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
2. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Jess has difficulty reading this one because Rand is “a political nut.” But Rory insists he finish it, and he does try again on the condition that she “give the painful Hemingway another chance.”

3. Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Business

Lorelai’s no dummy — and she really only doesn’t look bookish because next to Rory, nobody looks bookish. But she’s got a business degree and there’s no doubt that there are more business titles than these secreted away in the Gilmore bookshelves.

1. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
2. What Color Is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles
3. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Classic Nonfiction

Rory’s book packing strategies are really quite simple: a memoir for the bus, with a backup novel in case “I don’t really feel like reading about a person’s life right now”; nonfiction for lunch. Plus a book of short stories just in case. Of course, that’s just for going to school — anywhere else, and we’re going to need a bigger backpack…

1. The Art of Fiction by Henry James
2. A Bolt From the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
3. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
4.Jordi/Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin
5. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry
6. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
7. The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal
8. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
9. Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken

Mencken was a brilliant writer, critic, and satirist who many remember as the man who coined the term “Scopes Monkey Trial.” His work is a natural place for Richard and Rory to bond.

10. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan
11. The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
12. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
13. Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert
14. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell
15. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
16. Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett
17. Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
18. The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers

Doom and Gloom from the Eastern Europeans

This category is only here because Dean has such a comically hard time understanding why Rory finds these books romantic.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Dean finds Tolstoy depressing, but that’s really beside the point. The point is that he even bothered to read it at all, which is why this is about when fans often admit this is when they became Team Dean.

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
4. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
6. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
7. The Trial by Franz Kafka
8. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Rory buys this as a Christmas present for Dean, even though he clearly is not prepared for it.

Dystopian Futures (Non-YA)

Remember when post-apocalyptic futures weren’t all populated by young archer girls? Rory definitely does.

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
4. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
5. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Feminist Classics

Like the show’s feminism, Rory’s feminist reading is seldom commented on, but always there. On the floor near her locker, quietly being read on the couch. When it is noted — like when Lorelai tells Rory her sweater makes her look like Simone de Beauvoir — it’s not really talked about. It just is.

1. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
2. Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
3. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
5. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Foreign Classics

From Paris’s fav — the prim and proper Austen — to Henry Miller — who makes Rory blush bright red in the book store — Gilmore Girls has seen it all.

1. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney

Lorelai starts reading this new translation based on Rory’s recommendation; she stops reading it three minutes later.

2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
3. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
4. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
5. Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac
6. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
7. The Divine Comedy by Dante
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
10. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
11. Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
12. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
13. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
14. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
15. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
16. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
17. The Iliad by Homer
18. Inferno by Dante
19. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
20. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
21. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
22. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
23. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
24. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
25. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
27. Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
28. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
29. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
30. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
31. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
32. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
33. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
34. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
35. The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
36. Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
37. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
38. Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James
39. Sexus by Henry Miller
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
42. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
43. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
44. Ulysses by James Joyce
45. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
46. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

History

Even before she had Richard’s influence, Rory was cracking heavy tomes that would make a librarian’s eyes water.

1. The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
2. 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
3. The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
4. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

It took Richard more than thirty years to get through all six volumes, so don’t feel bad if you don’t knock it out in a week.

5. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
6. A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
7. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

Rory read this when she was 12. This book is not recommended reading for 12-year olds. Not even a little bit.

8. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
9. The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
10. Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
11. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore

Junk Food

They can’t all be Proust, right?

1. Carrie by Stephen King
2. Christine by Stephen King
3. Cujo by Stephen King
4. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
5. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
6. The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
7. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
8. R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
9. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
10. Shane by Jack Shaefer
11. The Shining by Stephen King
12. S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton
13. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

A feel-good story about a man reconnecting with an old teacher who is ill. It’s a bestseller, but Lorelai tells Rory to skip it when she worries about how she’ll ever read all the books in the Harvard library.

14. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Memoirs and Biographies

Rory isn’t perfect – not by a long shot. But more than any other type of book, memoirs act as surrogate role models, and Rory has had plenty. Want to accomplish as much as Hillary Clinton? She shows Rory how she did it in her books. Want to know how to face down grief? Rory picked up Joan Didion. And, of course, there are the wild childs of biography — Bourdain, Thurman, Milford — for vicarious thrills.

1. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
2. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
3. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
4. Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
5. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
6. Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
7. It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton
8. Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
9. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
10. The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
11. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
12. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
14. Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
15. Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
16. A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars
17. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
18. My Life as Author and Editor by H. L. Mencken
19. My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest
20. Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
21. Night by Elie Wiesel
22. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
23. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
24. Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon
25. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
26. Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
27. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

A biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was as well known for her independence and scandalous behavior as her writing. This is one of Rory’s “bus books.”

28. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
29. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
30. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
31. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
32. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath
33. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Following the loss of her husband of forty years, Didion is surprised at how her normally logical mind tries to deny the reality of his death. It’s no accident that this is what Rory’s reading as she tries to maintain her disintegrating relationship with Logan during their Valentine’s Day trip to Martha’s Vineyard.

Modern Novels

There have been a lot of worthy works that have been written since Gilmore Girls went off the air. What will Rory have read to balance out the Fifty Shades of Greys and the Game of Throneses?

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2. Atonement by Ian McEwan
3. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
4. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
6. Brick Lane by Monica Ali
7. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
8. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
9. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
10. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
11. Extravagance by Gary Krist
12. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
13. Fletch by Gregory McDonald
14. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
15. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
16. The Group by Mary McCarthy
17. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
18. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
19. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
20. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
21. How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
22. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
23. Ironweed by William J. Kennedy
24. Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
25. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
26. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
27. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
30. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
31. The Love Story by Erich Segal
32. The Manticore by Robertson Davies
33. Marathon Man by William Goldman
34. The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
35. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
36. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
37. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
38. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
39. Old School by Tobias Wolff
40. Oracle Night by Paul Auster
41. Property by Valerie Martin
42. Quattrocento by James Mckean
43. A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
44. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
45. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
46. Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
47. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
48. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
49. Small Island by Andrea Levy
50. The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
51. The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
52. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
53. Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
54. The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
55. Unless by Carol Shields
56. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
57. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Not Just Kid Stuff

While you may not want to get all of your parenting advice from Judy Blume like Lorelai claims to have, there’s a lot more wisdom here than you might think at first glance.

1. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. Babe by Dick King-Smith
3. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
4. Deenie by Judy Blume
5. Eloise by Kay Thompson
6. Emily the Strange by Roger Reger
7. Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
8. Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
9. Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky
10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

April’s friends all love Luke. They call him Hagrid, which Anna, a fellow parent, has to explain to him. It means he’s, “Very big, very hairy, very lovable. It’s a huge compliment.”

11. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
12. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
13. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
14. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
15. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
16. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
17. Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers
18. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
19. The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum
20. Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers
21. Stuart Little by E. B. White
22. Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten
23. The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
24. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Philosophy and Religion

Richard brags that Rory could “discuss Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche at 10.” We couldn’t even spell Nietzsche at 10. Heck, we couldn’t do it now without a quick google search.

1. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
2. The Bhagavad Gita
3. Ethics by Spinoza
4. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
5. The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche

The remainder of Christopher’s graduation gift basket to Lorelai? A copy of “What Color is Your Parachute,” a DVD of “The Graduate,” a $25 dollar savings bond, a youth hostel card, and an application form for the armed forces. Say what you will about the man, but he covers his bases.

6. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Poetry

Poetry is open to many interpretations. Like when Emily and Richard give Rory a 100 year-old copy of Whitman. To them, it means love; to Lorelai, it’s a slap in the face.

1. The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
2. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
3. New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
4. Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
5. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
6. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Politics

Ah, the 2000s. It was a simpler time. If a CW show had any of these books lying around on their set today, they’d be found guilty of waging a “War on Decency” by Fox News.

1. Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore
2. George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
3. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
4. Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
5. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

Plays

Waiting for the return of Gilmore Girls is a bit like waiting for Godot, so Lorelai’s quote (while waiting for her father) really resonates. “Godot was just here. He said, ‘I ain’t waiting for Richard,’ grabbed a roll and left.”

1. Brigadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
2. The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

Rory buys Lorelai a copy of the play even though her mother’s only interest in it is the chance to make a mayonnaise joke. There is a connection, though: The play is about how the lives of two women are destroyed by a small town’s busybody mentality. Children’s Hour is basically the Upside Down version of Stars Hollow.

3. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
4. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
5. Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
6. Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
7. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
8. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
9. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
10. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
11. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
12. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Travel, Physical and Time

So much of the spirit of Gilmore Girls is rooted in home, but Rory’s dream has always been to travel the world. What will Stars Hollow look like to her in 2016?

1. Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves
2. Myra Waldo’s Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo
3. The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition

Maybe if they had paid a little closer attention to this book, Babette wouldn’t have freaked out out and called all the European embassies looking for them when Lorelai and Rory were a week late coming home.

4. Selected Hotels of Europe
5. Time and Again by Jack Finney
6. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Paris may roll her eyes, but once you strip away the nonsense, the Beat Generation expanded the American consciousness in ways we’re still feeling today.

1. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
2. The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
3. Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Here’s the moment we all changed our minds about Jess: He steals Rory’s copy of Howl from her bookshelf and later returns it with notes written in the margins. Swoon!

4. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life premieres Nov. 25 on Netflix.