Daria Morgendorffer captured hearts as the protagonist of Daria not by being adorable or charming, but by being a salty curmudgeon who just couldn’t find her place in the teenage world. And part of that salt—a part that a lot of similarly minded teens certainly related to—was the kind of media she adored. While Daria’s favorite TV show, Sick Sad World, certainly featured prominently on the show, she also mentioned 57 different books over the course of the show’s five seasons, all of which are listed below. The good people at Aerogramme Studio that put together this list were also kind enough to include links to free eBook editions of the tomes where available, which is great, because we’ve got a lot of sick, sad reading to do.


1. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Gutenberg / Kindle)

2. Sense And Sensibility by Jane Austen (Gutenberg)

3. City Of Glass by Paul Auster

4. Rule Of The Bone by Russell Banks

5. How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

6. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Gutenberg / Kindle)

7. The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane (Gutenberg / Kindle)

8. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

9. A Journal Of The Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (Gutenberg / Kindle)

10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Gutenberg)

11. The House Of The Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Gutenberg / Kindle)

12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Gutenberg / Kindle)

13. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

14. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

15. On Moral Fiction by John Gardner

16. The Life And Complete Work Of Francisco Goya by Pierre Gassier

17. Howl And Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

18. The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen

19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

20. The Iliad by Homer (Gutenberg / Kindle)

21. Daisy Miller by Henry James (Gutenberg / Kindle)

22. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Gutenberg)

23. Critique Of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (Gutenberg / Kindle)

24. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

25. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

26. Sons And Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (Gutenberg / Kindle)

27. Death In Venice by Thomas Mann

28. Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West by Cormac McCarthy

29. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Gutenberg / Kindle)

30. Death Of ASalesman by Arthur Miller

31. 1984 by George Orwell (eBooks@Adelaide)

32. Animal Farm by George Orwell (eBooks@Adelaide)

33. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

34. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (Gutenberg)

35. Being And Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

36. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

37. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (Gutenberg / Kindle)

38. Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Gutenberg)

39. Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare (Gutenberg)

40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Gutenberg / Kindle)

41. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (Gutenberg / Kindle)

42. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (Gutenberg)

43. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

44. Angle Of Repose by Wallace Stegner

45. The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

46. Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor (Gutenberg / Kindle)

47. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Gutenberg / Kindle)

48. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Gutenberg / Kindle)

49. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Gutenberg / Kindle)

50. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

51. Henry & Glenn Forever by Igloo Tornado

52. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Gutenberg / Kindle)

53. The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain (Gutenberg / Kindle)

54. The Art Of War by Sun Tzu

55. Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

56. The Island Of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells (Gutenberg / Kindle)

57. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (Gutenberg / Kindle)