Can we judge a TV character by the cover of the book they are holding? Maybe not, but it's certainly a clue to what they're thinking about and why they are behaving the way they do. David Stubbs has reviewed the reading habits of key figures in screen dramas with interesting results: Tony Stonem, the tricksy anti-hero of early Skins, liked Nietzsche and Sartre; Tony Soprano leafed through Machiavelli; True Blood's Tara Thornton killed time with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
But it is Mad Men that perhaps puts the most emphasis on its characters' literary tastes: Don Draper has pored over Frank O'Hara's 1957 poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency ("Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again") and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything, the 1958 novel about five ambitious young women working at a New York publishing house. Joan Holloway and her fellow secretaries, on the other hand, have been gripped by DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
These glimpses of bookish interest make you wonder: which other well-thumbed titles do the characters have on their shelves? What else do they plan to read or have they decided to ignore? Watching, we may feel the urge to shout: "Don't bother with that. You need to read this right now!" Take Mad Men: season three opens in April 1963; February had seen the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, a key feminist title that explored women's anger at being confined to domesticity. This surely is what Peggy, Joan and Betty – and Don and the alcoholic misogynists of Sterling Cooper – should be devouring.
What further reading would you recommend for them? And what about your favourite characters in other shows? What does Rachel from Glee need on her e-reader, for instance? I haven't read it but this sounds like a good starting point.
