'Mad Men'-Inspired Reading List

It’s summer. That means Mad Men SHOULD be airing new episodes right now. But, thanks to difficult and drawn out contract negotiations, the beginning of the show’s fifth season has been pushed back to next year. (They only just started shooting recently.)


But to keep us thinking about the deliciously nuanced and layered period drama, the show’s blog has released a Mad Men reading list:
“Betty reading The Group in the bathtub. Don Draper with a copy of Exodus in bed. Henry Francis with a whole stack of books near the fireplace. Literature always gets its due in Mad Men. But how many of the books cited in the series have you actually read?”

Here’s their recommended, show-related summer reading list by season:

Season 1: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe; Exodus* by Leon Uris and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence.

Season 2: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone; Meditations in an Emergency* by Frank O’Hara; Moby Dick* by Herman Melville; Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. (If you want to see that amazingly poignant scene where Don Draper reads a section of a poem from Meditations in an Emergency, go here. They've disabled the video from being embedded.)

Season 3: Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy; The Group by Mary McCarthy and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Season 4: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict; The Clue of the Black Keys by Carolyn Keene and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre.

Which ones have you read? Which ones do you want to read? (The handful I've read are marked with an asterisk.*)

Image credit: AMC via The Poetry Habit.