Rory: Well, having company is about making sacrifices.
Lorelai: Martha Stewart?
Rory: I paraphrased Proust.
(It Should've Been Lorelai, Season Two, Episode 14, Gilmore Girls)

I wake every night about 2am for a bout of sleeplessness.

Reliable, smart people tell me not to look at my phone during this time, because I'll never go back to sleep. Early on this past Tuesday morning, after an internal debate about the wisdom of my friends and the hopelessness of my addiction to my iPhone, I opened Twitter and read that Netflix had closed a deal with Warner Bros. for a limited-series revival of Gilmore Girls to be written by series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. My insomnia persisted.

Oh, Gilmore Girls. A show that is, on its surface, about a mother and daughter and a surprisingly small age gap (Lorelai Gilmore giving birth to daughter Rory at age 16, raising her on her own). But it’s a show that served as televisual comfort food for millions. Myself among them.

The episode cited above begins with a discussion of William Congreve’s 1697 play, The Mourning Bride (Lorelai: “But my question is, how did that happen? How was it that suddenly everyone in the world was saying ‘music has charms to soothe the savage beast’ when it was written breast?”) and, later, 16 year-old Paris warns Rory not to harbour any “Pinteresque fantasies”.

Gilmore Girls aired last in 2007 and over its run it featured, among other things, a guest appearance from Norman Mailer (season five, episode six). As himself. Because, you know. With mentions as various as Horton Hears a Who, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary and Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Gilmore Girls is a show that does literary references.

The fast-talking show ran for seven seasons. 153 episodes of about 39 minutes each. That adds up to 5,967 minutes of fast-talking, culture-infused Gilmore-land. Australian writer Patrick Lenton tallied that 339 books are referenced directly over the course of the series. That means that, basically, a book was featured every fifteen minutes.

Lenton’s seemingly exhaustive list does not include the countless embedded literary references within the programme – nods to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors from the turn of last century (“I think Edith Wharton would have been proud, and busy taking notes,” Lorelai to her mother in episode six, series one), in-jokes about classic American stage plays (“I’m sorry, when did I move to Salem?” Rory in episode 14, season two) and heated debates about the role of writer in society (“Richard Hottelet was four months in a Nazi prison working for the UP. Hunter Thompson lived with the Hell’s Angels…” Logan to Rory in season five, episode seven).

Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, Connecticut is a town with perpetual fairy light, magical charm. But, perhaps more strikingly, Stars Hollow is made up of books and book lovers. It’s a town where books matter. (“I thought you said you didn’t read much,” Rory to Jess in season 2. “What is much?” he skulks back.) In Stars Hollow, books can and should be devoured, remembered and referred to. It’s as necessary to have a pile of good books as it is to have a vat of good coffee in reserve.

So, we’re heard that Netflix will give us four new 90-minute episodes. According to my math, that means we are owed at LEAST 24 books (alongside some more oblique – and satisfying – allusions).

So what’s missing from the already impressive list? What do we think that Rory and Lorelai should be reading? What have they been reading since they’ve been gone?

I offer some humble (and largely Irish!) suggestions, which are based on my own preferences and predictions:

Rory left season seven to go on the campaign trail with Obama, so she’ll have read The Audacity of Hope and Dreams of My Father. Rory always had the most eclectic taste in books, demonstrating an interest in Irish lit (seen reading Heaney’s Beowulf and Finnegans Wake) but now, time-strapped, working every hour of the day as a hard-hitting political journalist, she needs things to dip in and out of. Anthologies, ahoy! I prescribe The Long Gaze Back, Windharp and Dubliners 100.

Edward Hermann, the marvellous actor who portrayed Gilmore patriarch Richard Gilmore, passed away on New Year’s Eve last year. Emily will be without him, and her life will have changed utterly. We’ll see her reading Colm Tóibín’s magnificent Nora Webster, and Meghan O’Rourke’s remarkable The Long Goodbye. (I also see her with Tad Friend’s delightful Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.)

Lorelai should, of course, be seen with a copy of Lauren Graham’s gorgeous debut novel Someday, Someday Maybe. She will read and weep over A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (and perhaps realise her own childhood wasn’t, actually, that bad). But, then, I can see her diving into Anne Enright’s extraordinary The Green Road, seeing flashes of Emily in Rosaleen Madigan. Lorelai and Rory will be Elena Ferrante experts, no doubt, and they’ll have views about Jonathan Franzen.

Sookie and Jackson have three children now, as Sookie was pregnant at the end of season seven. After many years of immersion in the world of picture books (Mary Murphy, Marie Louise Fitzpatrick, Oliver Jeffers and Yasmeen Ismael please!) one hopes that the two will have moved the children onto the joys of Eoin Colfer, Sheena Wilkinson and Sarah Crossan. For life outside of their children (which I’m sure exists!) I envisage an episode with Michael Pollan and Alice Waters guest starring, Jackson pressing both for an endorsement of his latest crop of zucchini, and advising them on the best way to fry a turkey.

And the other supporting characters? What do they have in their back pockets? Dean reading Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men, Paris with Lean In and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business, Jess with Colin Barrett’s Young Skins, Michel with Jacob Tomsky’s hospitality memoir Heads in Beds, Logan with Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know and Luke with, well, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Whatever it is, I’ll be watching, and adding it all to my TBR pile. Where they read? I will follow.

Sarah Bannan is the author of Weightless (Bloomsbury Circus)