Gilmore Girls Showed Me That It Was Always Cool to Be a Bookworm

Fall is always a special time of year for Gilmore Girls fans. The beloved TV series, about mother-daughter pair Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel), is rife with cozy early aughts fashion, quirky small town antics and loads of coffee, and is pretty much synonymous with autumn at this point. That’s especially true this year, as the show celebrates 25 years since its premiere on the WB in October 2000.

I also turned 25 this year, and it’s strange to think that a show that first aired a few months after I was born could have such an impact on me. But for an introverted writer and pop culture fanatic, Gilmore Girls was my ideal watch. I was always charmed by Rory’s best friend Lane (Keiko Agena), whose eclectic music taste (Fleetwood Mac, Nico and Blur?) matched my own to a tee. I was never as brash as Rory’s academic rival Paris Geller (Liza Weil), but I carried her dedication as editor of her school newspapers with me when I took on the same role at my own college publication (though I like to think I was way less intense with our staff).

It was always Rory’s love of reading, however, that kept drawing me back to the show — and still does, when its time for my yearly rewatch.

We’ve all seen the many photos of Rory, sweater-clad or in her Chilton prep school uniform, with a book in hand. She devoured everything, from Jane Austen to Joan Didion to Isabel Allende, and her TBR was always growing too. All bibliophiles can recognize her bookish struggles, like not having enough space in her bedroom for her ever-expanding library, and her absolute euphoria over the one-of-a-kind smell of an old, musty volume.

I’m far from alone in being inspired by elements of Rory Gilmore. Her character is a sort of online scholarly idol, encouraging people to study more (Rory’s famous “Who cares if I’m pretty if I fail my finals?” line has become a popular TikTok sound). She’s motivated many to pick up a book instead of their phone when they have free time. Fans have gone so far as to create the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, which compiles the hundreds of books mentioned in the original series and its 2016 revival for people to work their way through.

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In 2023, my friend and I completed our own version of the challenge, where we read one book from the show every month for the entire year. I blew through Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome on a February day, and annotated Raine Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet so thoroughly, the original text was barely visible. There were some titles that I’d like to give another chance one day, (sorry, Slaughterhouse-Five) and some that became enduring favorites (thank you, Mrs. Dalloway and The God of Small Things).

I remember my friend and I, texting each other our reading progress and opinionated thoughts throughout the year. As we began new jobs and lives in different states, we were brought together again through these books; a testament to the challenge and the show itself.

But aside from pushing me outside of my literary comfort zone, Rory showed me that it was cool to even have said comfort zone in the first place. When I started watching Gilmore Girls as a teenager, Rory was the first time that I saw a shy bookworm like myself as the main character. She was the quiet student at the back of the class, who was told to speak up and socialize more, who used her lunch period to catch up on reading. She was the kid who was playfully teased by her mom when her bag was weighed down by the books she brought with her everywhere. She was someone who lit up when she talked about her favorite authors, who suddenly became an extrovert when gushing about the stories that impacted her most.

These were all experiences I’d had too, and had often felt alone in having, until I saw them reflected on TV. No matter how much Rory’s character evolved (for better or worse) throughout the series, her passion for reading always remained, from Chilton to Yale to her aimless adult years in A Year in the Life. It goes to show that once that love is fostered, it never truly goes away.

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Now that I write about books for a living, I can’t help but think that Rory Gilmore helped me get here. In many ways, her character represents that it’s okay to embrace who you know you are — and to always do that with a book close by. 

Years later, I’m still happy to hear Carole King and her daughter Louise Goffin belt the show’s beloved theme song on repeat, or get into the age-old Team Dean, Jess or Logan debate. But to me, the core of Gilmore Girls is the power that books have in shaping your life. As the show continues to endear viewers, old and new, every autumn, I only hope that message rings true too.