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The Reading List of Daria Morgendorffer

In the mid-1990s, thanks to Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead series, Daria Morgendorffer gained her own spin-off show. Beginning in 1997, Daria’s acerbic wit and relatable misanthropy graced our screens, giving smart and oft-misunderstood teenage girls a role model at last.

The series was created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn for MTV, and satirised US high school life and suburban America, as well as biting commentary about popular culture, societal expectations and pressures, and social class. It spoke to many of us who were teens during those years, especially those who could understand Daria’s need for something more than this strange and superficial world we were born into.

Daria often buried her self in a book (we here at Reading Addicts can all relate to that!) and the books she read were mostly high-brow, darkly themed, or classic literature. She was actually a pretty wonderful role model to have!
Thanks to multiple nerdy blogsters in the World Wide Web we now have a comprehensive list of all the books Daria read or referenced in her 5 years on television. Find them below, along with links beside them to purchase a copy for yourself if you are missing it from you collection.

Can you match Daria book-for-book?

  1. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (US/UK)

  2. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (US/UK)

  3. City of Glass by Paul Auster (US/UK)

  4. Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks (US/UK)

  5. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (US/UK)

  6. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (US/UK)

  7. The Red Badge of Courage by by Stephen Crane (US/UK)

  8. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (US/UK)

  9. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (US/UK)

  10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (US/UK)

  11. The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (US/UK)

  12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (US/UK)

  13. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (US/UK)

  14. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (US/UK)

  15. On Moral Fiction by John Gardner (US/UK)

  16. The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya by Pierre Gassier (US/UK)

  17. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (US/UK)

  18. The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen (US/UK)

  19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (US/UK)

  20. The Iliad by Homer (US/UK)

  1. Daisy Miller by Henry James (US/UK)

  2. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (US/UK)

  3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (US/UK)

  4. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (US/UK)

  5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (US/UK)

  6. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (US/UK)

  7. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (US/UK)

  8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (US/UK)

  9. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (US/UK)

  10. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (US/UK)

  11. 1984 by George Orwell (US/UK)

  12. Animal Farm by George Orwell (US/UK)

  13. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (US/UK)

  14. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (US/UK)

  15. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (US/UK)

  16. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (US/UK)

  17. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (US/UK)

  18. Macbeth by William Shakespeare (US/UK)

  1. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (US/UK)

  2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (US/UK)

  3. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (US/UK)

  4. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (US/UK)

  5. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (US/UK)

  6. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (US/UK)

  7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (US/UK)

  8. Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor (US/UK)

  9. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (US/UK)

  10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (US/UK)

  11. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (US/UK)

  12. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (US/UK)

  13. Henry & Glenn Forever by Igloo Tornado (US/UK)

  14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (US/UK)

  15. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain (US/UK)

  16. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (US/UK)

  17. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (US/UK)

  18. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells (US/UK)

  19. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (US/UK)

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One Comment

  • Douglas says:

    Great list! I got 29 read. Not bad. Though I will never believe that any high schooler, no matter how smart or literate, can EVER read “The Sound and the Fury” and understand it. No way.

    😉

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