13 Book Recommendations from the Gilmore Girls Themselves

Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days and brutal murder of the Romanovs as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka. Historically vivid and compelling, THE KITCHEN BOY is also a touching portrait of a loving family that was in many ways similar, yet so different, from any other.

I thought my first exposure to Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful take on the experiences of Indian immigrants was in college, but I should have known better. The Gilmores pay tribute to Lahiri through a mention of her powerful story about the Ganguli family as they travel from their traditional life in Calcutta to their fraught transformation into Americans.

As a budding journalist with a definite book obsession, it’s no wonder Rory once read this memoir of a young writer. Amy Tan, author of THE JOY LUCK CLUB, uses her talent and humor to share insights into her own life as the daughter of immigrants and her journey to becoming an acclaimed author.

A book before a movie, He’s Just Not That Into You is Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s guide to relationships. Reexamining typical mindsets and analyzing common scenarios, the two dole out the tough love so that women can stop making excuses for a person who might not even be interested and go find the one who is.

On Elizabeth’s wish list

As days grew shorter and nights colder I (naturally) began listening to more podcasts and watching documentaries about a cheery subject: serial killers. I’m excited to curl up with THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY because of Erik Larson’s fantastic eye for character, storytelling, and impeccable research in his true-crime investigation into the serial killer who haunted the 1893 World’s Fair. Cocoa and killers go well together, right?

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling-- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

Cormac McCarthy was long an influence of mine before this novel. It is one of the few books I can recall that has kept me awake at night. It is bleak, gritty, hurtful, and I think extraordinarily human.

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel has become a modern classic. Equal parts family saga, forbidden love story, and political drama, it chronicles in exquisite, atmospheric detail an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969.

In 1967, Susanna Kaysen spent almost two years in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods. With vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers, Kaysen's searing memoir gives us an up-close view of mental illness and the road to recovery.

When Dave Eggers was a college senior, in the space of five weeks, he lost both of his parents to cancer and became the guardian of his 8-year-old brother. His moving memoir manages to be a simultaneously hilarious and deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. How is this hot dude not ugly-crying on the train?

Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but in the face of unbearable humiliation, her gift of telepathy is turned into a weapon of horror and destruction that her classmates would never forget. The terror of Stephen King's legendary debut novel makes for a timeless thriller.

No one explores the often rocky relationship between mothers and daughters, and what it means to be lifelong friends, better than Rebecca Wells. Poignant, funny, and outrageous, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a classic you’ll want to read again and again.

“Life changes fast.”