The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

Oh Buzzfeed, you coy minx. Full of tantalizing articles to keep me from productivity. But I know your game now, and it's backfired.

Buzzfeed recently published this article listing all 339 books referenced in Gilmore Girls. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that show, I feel sorry for your teenage selves. The witty dialogue and touching drama of a single mother and her brainy teen daughter is something everyone should have the chance to watch and love. Or hate. Whatever.

Anyways, despite my English degree, I'm not well-read at all. It's pretty shameful, really. So here's the time to do something about it. I've read 37 of Rory's books thus far. I'm not about to read the remaining 302 books (partially because when I was in college I made a vow to myself to avoid Faulkner's work at all costs, and there are like 4 of his books in there), but I've looked through the list and come up with 50 books that I'm interested in (or feel ashamed that I haven't read yet). Here they are:

1. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Art of Fiction by Henry James
5. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
6. Atonement by Ian McEwan
7. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
8. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
9. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
10. Beloved by Toni Morrison
11. Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
12. A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
13. Carrie by Stephen King
14. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
15. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
16. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
17. Emma by Jane Austin
18. Ethics by Spinoza
19. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
20. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
21. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
22. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
23. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
24. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
25. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
26. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
27. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
28. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
29. Inferno by Dante
30. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
31. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
32. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
33. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
35. Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
36. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
37. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
38. The Second Sex by Simone de Beavoir
39. The Shining by Stephen King
40. Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut
41. The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
42. Song of the Simple Truth: The complte Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
43. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
44. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
45. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
46. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath
47. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. What colour is your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles
49. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
50. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

So yes. I'm not giving myself a deadline, but I'm anticipating it'll take more than a year. Maybe you'll hear about these books as I read them, maybe you won't. But I'll leave a note at the end of my posts to let you know what I'm reading, and how many I've read so far.

Maybe you want to get back into reading? Make yourself a challenge and leave it in the comments section!

Let the reading games begin!