Much-loved animated sitcom Daria screened on MTV in the United States for five seasons, beginning in March 1997. A spin-off from Mike Judge’s hugely successful Beavis and Butt-head, the series centred on Daria Morgendorffer, a smart, disaffected teenager with a caustic wit.
While Daria’s favourite TV show, Sick Sad World, featured heavily throughout the series, the show was also filled with literary references. Here are 57 books that Daria read or that were mentioned during the episodes, with links to free eBook editions where available in parentheses. As DariaWiki puts it, “If it’s old, morbid, or esoteric, Daria will read the hell out of it.”
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (Gutenberg)
- City of Glass by Paul Auster
- Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Red Badge of Courage by by Stephen Crane (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
- A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Gutenberg)
- The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- On Moral Fiction by John Gardner
- The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya by Pierre Gassier
- Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
- The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Iliad by Homer (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Daisy Miller by Henry James (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Gutenberg)
- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
- Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- 1984 by George Orwell (eBooks@Adelaide)
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (eBooks@Adelaide)
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (Gutenberg)
- Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
- Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Gutenberg)
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (Gutenberg)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (Gutenberg)
- The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Henry & Glenn Forever by Igloo Tornado
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells (Gutenberg / Kindle)
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (Gutenberg / Kindle)
All five seasons of Daria are available on Hulu Plus and on DVD.
For more book lists see Ernest Hemingway’s Reading List for a Young Writer and Stephen King’s Reading List: 22 Books Recommended via Twitter.
Sources: goodreads.com and dariawiki.org
