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Sites We Like: The Lisa Simpson Book Club

Scott Beauchamp

Staff Writer

Scott Beauchamp is a veteran and writer living in Brooklyn. He also writes about culture and books at Full Stop.

One of the many many things I like about The Simpsons is that there isn’t any single character that the writers want you to sympathize with. Certainly not Homer, the dopish but lovable star of the show. Certainly not the put-upon Marge, or the delinquent Bart. If anyone comes close to being the character that you see yourself in, it has to be the bookish Lisa. Being a reader in a television nation, I’m sure you can identify with Lisa’s outsider nerdiness. And not only does she read a lot, she has great taste in literature! We should all take a cue from Lisa Simpson and start a reading list based solely on the wonderful books that she reads on the show. The hard part is just compiling it all.

Lucky for us, someone has starting doing that already! A tumblr called The Lisa Simpson Book Club has been up and running for a while, and its goal is to compile all the books and magazines that Lisa has been seen reading in every Simpsons episode. Along with the reading list, they also post funny bookish stills from the show.

This is the list so far:

BOOKS

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Ghost World, Daniel Clowes

The Adventures of Tin Tin, Hergé

Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw

Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren

The Master of the Senate, Robert Caro

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

The Babysitter’s Club, Ann M. Martin

The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

The poems of Emily Dickinson

The works of Jane Austen

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The poems of Robert Pinsky

The work of Joyce Carol Oates

The work of Gore Vidal

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

The work of Tom Wolfe

Moneyball, Michael Lewis

MAGAZINES

Non-Threatening Boys Magazine

UTNE Reader

The New Yorker

Harper’s / Lapham’s Quarterly

The Atlantic Kids’ Edition

The Paris Review

Wired

Junior Skeptic Magazine

The New Republic for Kids

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So there you are! A Lisa Simpson reading list. It’s like your own pop-culture Great Books program. Enjoy!