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The Gilmore Book Club
Gilmore Girls Gift Guide 2021
It’s that time of year again, and the Gilmore Gift Guide is here to make gifting season super easy. From clothing to books there’s a variety of items on the list, each hand-picked by the Gilmore Book Club and full of Gilmore Girls goodness.
And most of the items on this list are made by independent artists and small businesses! Show these artists and businesses your support by purchasing these items for your loved ones this year. Support for them and a present for you- now that’s the holiday spirit.
I recommend buying gifts as early as possible this year; shipping and shortages can cause delays so get your shopping done now!
This page may contain affiliate links. For those purchases, the Gilmore Book Club receives a small commission, which means I can keep all the book-lovin', Gilmore-obsession, and foodie fun going!
Stars Hollow Winter Holiday Travel Poster by WindowShopGal $16.50
Get all four virtual events (one for each season inspired by A Year In The Life: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall) at one low price! Depending on the event, individual event prices may increase, but if you buy all four events now, you won’t have to pay any more this year! Winter book and event date to be announced soon.
There are options to buy for yourself or give/email to someone as a gift. Perfect gift for any Gilmore Girls fan and book-lovers.
Books
Some I think the Gilmore girls would like to read, some I’d like to read, and some that are currently trending. There’s a book for everyone on your list. Hover your mouse over each book for a quick summary. Each book is from Bookshop.org which gives money to small book stores so your purchase helps small, local businesses!
Fiction
A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan's personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
Hamnet is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure... In Hamnet, Shakespeare's marriage is complicated and troubled, yet brimming with love and passion... This novel is at once about the transfiguration of life into art-- it is O'Farrell's extended speculation on how Hamnet's death might have fueled the creation of one of his father's greatest plays-- and at the same time, it is a master class in how she, herself does it... O'Farrell has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world... We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover's workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed, and we can see how the pale London sun reaches down, like ladders, through the narrow gaps in buildings to illuminate the rain glazed street.... As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing.
Non-Fiction
The surprising and compelling story of two rival geniuses in an all-out race to decode one of the world's most famous documents--the Rosetta Stone--and their twenty-year-long battle to solve the mystery of ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs.
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum ever year, and yet most people don't really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries.
A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII
Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author's status--part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer's writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people--the grinders, binders, and scribes--in their creation and survival.
Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.
The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.
Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent's "sardine" dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years.
Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making.
Gilmore Inspired
From the 2-time Tony Award-winner and the star of TV's Younger, funny and intimate stories and reflections about how crafting has kept her sane while navigating the highs and lows of family, love, and show business (and how it can help you, too).
The behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Godfather, fifty years after the classic film's original release.
The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie's fiery creation have been told--sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others for irresistible insights into how the movie whose success some initially doubted roared to glory.
Never before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman's rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life.
Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman's fateful train journey.
Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like "guilt, and guilt, and guilt" these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.
"But what is the ninth kingdom?" she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. "It is the kingdom of the frozen will," comes the reply. "There is no going back."
Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.
Kristine’s Picks
Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford, and dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics.
She prefers the dependability of facts--except for one: the younger brother she loves with all her heart doesn't have long to live. When George becomes captivated by a brand-new book called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and begs her to find out where Narnia came from, there's no way she can refuse.
Despite her timidity about approaching the famous author, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with the Oxford don and his own brother, imploring them for answers. What she receives instead are more stories . . . stories of Jack Lewis's life, which she takes home to George.
Why won't Mr. Lewis just tell her plainly what George wants to know? The answer will reveal to Meg many truths that science and math cannot, and the gift she thought she was giving to her brother--the story behind Narnia--turns out to be his gift to her, instead: hope.
Archetypes are real. Muses are real. Writers are the channels of these spirits & if that sounds like witchcraft that's because it is. These stories gave me chills. Sylvia Plath & Lana Del Rey course through the veins of these dark, sexy, mind-bending, fantastical, romantic, & haunting tales. Authors from different genres came together in their love & passion for these muses.
A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind--our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions--and how mind and brain relate to art.
Libraries are being ransacked. France is torn apart by war. A French librarian is determined to resist. Told through smuggled letters to an author, an ordinary librarian describes the brutal Nazi occupation of her small coastal village and the extraordinary measures she takes to fight back.
On the eve of World War I, twenty-one-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees meets the acclaimed poet W. B. Yeats at a soirée in London. Although Yeats is famously eccentric and many years her senior, Georgie is drawn to him, and when he extends a cryptic invitation to a secret society, her life is forever changed.
From the author of How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the present
W. H. Auden once wrote that art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present--and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our personal density.
The ability to connect with another person's physical and emotional state is one of the most elusive interpersonal skills to develop, but this book shows you just how approachable it can be. In our fast-paced, tech-obsessed lives, rarely do we pay genuine, close attention to one another. With all that's going on in the world and the never-ending demands of our daily lives, most of us are too stressed and preoccupied to be able to really listen to each other. Often, we misunderstand or talk past each other. Many of us are left wishing that the people in our lives could really listen, understand, and genuinely connect with us. Based on cutting-edge neuroscience research and years of clinical work, psychiatrist Edward Brodkin and therapist Ashley Pallathra take us on a wide-ranging and surprising journey through fields as diverse as social neuroscience and autism research, music performance, pro basketball, and tai chi. They use these stories to introduce the four pillars of human connection: Relaxed Awareness, Listening, Understanding, and Mutual Responsiveness. Accessible and engaging, Missing Each Other explains the science, research, and biology underlying these pillars of human connection and provides exercises through which readers can improve their own skills and abilities in each.
From renowned classicist Edith Hall, ARISTOTLE'S WAY is an examination of one of history's greatest philosophers, showing us how to lead happy, fulfilled, and meaningful lives.
Smart, quirky, female-centric, drenched in pop-culture references--Amy Sherman-Palladino's singular TV voice has won her legions of fans and critical appreciation over the past two decades, thanks to shows like "Gilmore Girls," "Bunheads," and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." Sherman-Palladino--the first woman ever to win Emmy Awards for both comedy writing and directing in a single year--may write about different decades and milieus, but her sensibility is unique and unmistakable throughout. Her greatest contribution may be her pantheon of unforgettable female characters, including Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel), Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy), Michelle Simms (Sutton Foster), Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), and Miriam "Midge" Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan). In The Women of Amy Sherman-Palladino, writers from different walks of life--scholars, critics, writers, comedians, dancers--take us on a journey through the worlds of these characters, and how they have influenced their own lives. This is the second book in "The Women of" series, after The Women of David Lynch, published in June 2019. This unique series, covers great female characters in television and film.
Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The "Everything Store" has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction.
Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.
Intelligent, passionate, rebellious, and brave, Languoreth is the unforgettable heroine of The Lost Queen, a tale of conflicted loves and survival set against the cinematic backdrop of ancient Scotland, a magical land of myths and superstition inspired by the beauty of the natural world. One of the most powerful early medieval queens in British history, Languoreth ruled at a time of enormous disruption and bloodshed, when the burgeoning forces of Christianity threatened to obliterate the ancient pagan beliefs and change her way of life forever.
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TeePublic- Multiple colors and styles available
I Smell Books Hoodie from the Gilmore Book Club $45
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Gilmore Book Club Tote $20-$24
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I Smell Snow Sticker from Marissalouise21 $2.50
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Everything is up to 30% off and all classic tees are $14 until December 19th!
All I Want For Christmas Is Rory's Books Long Sleeve T-Shirt from The Gilmore Book Club $22
TeePublic-Multiple colors and styles available
Where You Lead Long-Sleeve T-Shirt from Stars Hollow Mercantile $22
TeePublic-Multiple colors and styles available
Rory and Paris Book Club Hoodie from the Gilmore Book Club $45
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Where You Lead I Will Follow Gilmore Girls Morse Code Necklace- A Vintage Joy- $40
Get 15% off with code GBC15
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