I really don’t think there is any other show on TV that features more (Binge)Readers and Books then Orange is the New Black.

Books play a vital role in that series and I can highly recommend that you jump on the wagon of this show and not just for great book recommendations but also for terrific acting in a series that features a lot of diversity and women from all walks of life.

The series came about when real life Piper published a biography based on her experiences in prison. She was incarcerated for money-laundering in connection with a romantic relationship she had with a women who was working in an international drug kartell. Her memoir provides the basis for the popular Netflix-series that features around WASPy Piper Chapman and her on-and-off-lover in prison Alex Vause.

Alex is my favourite character on the show (in case you have not noticed, as I’m very very subtle about this fact) she is not only hot as hell, she is also the biggest bookworm imaginable.

The Library plays a vital role in the show and when in season 3 bed bugs take over the prison and the pest controllers order the burning of all books they even have a funeral for the books and book nerd Alex Vause starts reading the Qumran out of desperation as it is the only book that escaped the fire.

The ultimate book return:

We see the inmates reading in their bunks all the times. They hang out out in the library and very often make pretty smart references to their well-read pasts. The  inmates at Litchfield seem to have read it all – so in case you plan to start an Orange Bookclub or need something to read over the summer here is a list of books that have so far appeared in the series (up to season 4) so come in and browse a bit in Litchfield’s library. I hope you find something you like:

Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl
Ann Patchett – State of Wonder
Leah Vincent – Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood
Hanna Rosin – The End of Men
Adrianne Bryd – It’s sinful chocolate
Dana Reinhardt – We are the Goldens
John Green – The Fault in our stars
Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland
Ian McEwan – Atonement
Stephen King – The Mist
Virgina Woolf – A Biography
Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
Jeannette Walls – The Glass Castle
Jonathan Tropper – This is Where I Leave You
JK Rowling – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Jane Austen – Emma
Jane Austen – Pride & Prejudice
Kathryn Stockett – The Help
Victor Hugo – Les Misterables
Benjamin Hoff – The Tao of Pooh
Stephen King – Nightshift
Christopher McDougall – Born to Run
Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat Pray Love
David Benioff – City of Thieves
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
Meredith Zeitlin – Freshman Year & Other Unnatural Disasters
Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones
Bill Watterson – The  Authoritative Calvin & Hobbes
Dubner & Levitt – Freakonomics
Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch
Roald Dahl – The BFG
Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
Jonathan Kellerman – Killer
George Bernard Shaw – Arms and the Man
A. A. Milne – Winnie the Pooh
Philip K. Dick – A scanner darkly
Karen Joy Fowler – We are all completely besides ourselves
Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Nick Horny – Funny Girl
Budd Schulberg – What makes Buddy Run?
Janice Silverman Rebibo – My Beautiful Balooning Heart
David Crabb – Bad Kid
Andrew McCarthy – The Longest Way Home
Samuel R. Delany – Dhalgren
Bradberry & Grieves – Emotional Intelligence 2.0
Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet
Chimanda Ngozi Adichie – Americana
Dale Carnegie – How to stop worrying and start living
Lawrence Wright  – Going clear. Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird
Patrick Rothfuss – The Wise Man’s Fear
William Shakespeare – Julius Ceasar
Marya Hornbacher – Wasted
Stephen King – It
JRR Tolkien – The Silmarillion
William Golding – Lord of the Flies
Alexander McCall Smith – The Forgotten Affairs of Youth
Herman Melville – Moby Dick
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain
Michael Chabon – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Thomas Harris – The Silence of the Lambs
Gwen Bristow – The Handsome Road
Ross McDonald – The Name is Archer
Alice Miller – Breaking Down the Wall of Silence
Doug Crandell – The flawless skin of ugly people
Bruce Chatwin – In Patagonia
Jane Austen – Emma
Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat, Pray, Love
Walter Farley – The Black Stallion
Agatha Christie – And Then There Were None
Marie Kondo – The Live Changing Magic of Tidying up
Alice Munro – Dear Life
William Shakespeare – A Midsummer’s Night Dream

Should I ever end up in prison (hey I mean you never know with the Erdogans, Trumps and Putins on the rise) I hope I get a job in the library and nobody will be using my books then for stepladders, that much is clear.

Need a little break from reading? I can of course highly recommend to sneak in some OITNB binge-watching – I wont tell anybody 😉