Calling all fans of Gilmore Girls + books! This is the ultimate monthly reading challenge for the Rory Gilmore book list.

The Rory Gilmore book list is one of my most popular posts, and I also post a lot of bookish Gilmore Girls content both here and on Bookstagram.
So, since I was challenging myself to the goal of reading more books from the Rory Gilmore book list by monthly theme, I decided to go public with it and create The Rory Gilmore Book Club: a full reading challenge for the Rory Gilmore book list (now in its third year!).
The themes for my reading challenge for the Rory Gilmore book list are pretty vague and were chosen so that you can really read a variety of books YOU want to read from the list not books I pre-select for you.
Below are the monthly themes for this year, along with some personalized recommendations for each month, but you can also feel free to personalize your reading challenge for the Rory Gilmore book list with your own picks.
Want some reading buddies? Follow my Gilmore Girls reading challenge @TheRoryGilmoreBookClub on Instagram where we share our reads each month.
Reading Challenge for the Rory Gilmore Book List
January: A Short Book
Let’s start this challenge with an easy prompt to catapult your success. There are so many short books (under 250 pages ) on the list.
Below are a few I recommend you take a look at:
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Art of Living by Epictetus
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Candide by Voltaire
- Oedipus Rex by Sophicles
- The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
- Nancy Drew and The Witch Tree Symbol by Carolyn Keene
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
- Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
- Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
- Night by Elie Wiesel
Want more options? You can read just about any children’s book, poem, play, or short story on the list as well.
February: A Play or Short Story
This year, I wanted to challenge readers to read a different type of book, and that means a play, poem, or short story this month.
I liked this challenge for this month because these types of books tend to be shorter, so readers who find our club later in the year can easily catch up. Also, a lot of these types of books are romantic, which is also great for the month in which we celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Below are some options you may like:
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
- The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
- The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Of note, there is A LOT more Shakespeare on the full list if you are itching to read his works.
March: A Book Adapted to Film
There are also SO MANY book-to-film adaptions on the Gilmore Girls book list that I wrote a whole blog post about it. I love this particular challenge because you can both read and watch!
Below are just a few options I thought may intrigue you:
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (the movie My Fair Lady – a favorite of mine)
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Graduate by Charles Webb
- The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
- Love Story by Erich Segal
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
- Carrie by Stephen King
April: A Popular Author
When thinking about the Rory Gilmore reading challenge and why we do it, I thought one reason is to expand our reading of popular authors, both classic and modern. There are SO many opportunities on this list!
Check the whole Rory Gilmore book list to find the right one for you, but below are a few on my personal radar for this month that may interest you as well:
- Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
- Cujo by Stephen King
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Deenie by Judy Blume
- Emma by Jane Austen
- A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
- Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Of note, if you want to read Shakespeare or King, there are A LOT more options on the full list.
May: A Diverse Book
I wanted to make sure we devoted a month of the Rory Gilmore reading challenge to diverse reads. There’s not a TON on the list, but below the best options I found for you. Hopefully, there’s at least one you can pick up this month!
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
June: A Classic Book
Rory Gilmore is a lover of great literature, so it’s no surprise Rory’s book list is completely overflowing with classic books to read. I liked using this prompt in June because it’s the start of Summer, when people are relaxing more, and if you pick up something particularly challenging, you can spend time all Summer finishing it up if you need to.
Below are just a few options I wanted to draw your attention to:
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (referenced in Rory’s valedictorian speech, if you want something really seasonal!)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
July: Poetry
As Summer “heats up,” let’s take a break from the norm with some poetry as we (hopefully) relax in the sun.
Below are a bunch of options for you:
- The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
- Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
- Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
- Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
- The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
- Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
- Haiku, Volume 2: Spring by R.H. Blyth
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
August: A Children’s Book
August is a time to relax, so let’s read something quick and easy. There are SO MANY children’s books on the Rory Gilmore book list that I wrote an entire blog post about it.
Below are a few I wanted to highlight as ones I thought you may be interested in picking up as an adult.
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Deenie by Judy Blume
- Eloise at the Plaza by Kay Thompson
- Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Nancy Drew and The Witch Tree Symbol by Carolyn Keene
- Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
- Stuart Little by E.B. White
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
- Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers and Mary Shepard
- Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
- Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss
- Charlie & the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Babe by Dick King-Smith
September: Author from Another Country
I wanted this year’s challenge to have more focus on both diversity and authors versus books, so combining the two felt like a good way to accomplish this.
While people participate in this challenge worldwide, so I can’t account for books outside everyone’s country, below are some options for authors and books outside the United States and around the world:
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Art of Living by Epictetus
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Basic Writings of Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Candide by Voltaire
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
- The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Oedipus Rex by Sophicles
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
There are honestly SO many options this month that I had to really narrow it down. There’s a lot more Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Allende on the list if you want to take a closer look.
October: A Banned Book
This year, Banned Books Week is the first week of October, so let’s celebrate by reading one. Banned books are those books most often challenged on school reading lists, often for content as simple as diversity. That’s why it’s important to read them.
Below are some options to choose from:
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Call of the Wild by Jack Longdon
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
November: A Non-Fiction Book
Since November is generally considered to be “Non-Fiction November” in the book work, I thought this was a great time to kill two birds with one stone, and also to make sure you get at least one non-fiction read in this year from the Rory Gilmore book challenge.
Below are a few options:
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
- What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles
- Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
- Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
- Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
- Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
- Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
December: A Book on Your To Be Read (TBR) List
For the last month of this year’s Rory Gilmore reading challenge, I thought it was important to close out the year by reading something that’s STILL on your TBR list, so you really feel accomplished when you complete it.
Of course, this is another very personal challenge, so you should peruse Rory Gilmore’s full book list to find the one that’s right for you, but below are a few on my personal TBR list that may interest you too:
- Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
- House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
- A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
- Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Old School by Tobias Wolff
- Out of Africa by Isak Dineson
- Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
- Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
- Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
- Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Instagram Story Templates to Track Your Reading Challenge
I love creating bookish Instagram story templates, so I created three where we can track our reading challenge for the Rory Gilmore book list.
Feel free to save them to your phone and use it by super-imposing book covers on the prompts for each month and/or filling out the book review form.
Be sure to follow and tag me @TheRoryGilmoreBookClub! I love to re-share your successes.



graziella
Monday 13th of June 2022
could i please get the bookish printable PDFs emailed?
Jules Buono
Monday 13th of June 2022
Hello, and thank you for subscribing. You should have received the list automatically upon subscribing, but in case you didn't, I also just emailed it to you! Enjoy!!