Among all the pictures and videos of online meetings, I am often drawn to the background, like a peeping tom, trying to read the sideways titles on the plethora of bookshelves. This also happens to me every time I see a character on a television or movie, holding a book or even better, quoting from one. If you haven’t yet, you may be tempted to now “book stalk” when you are binge watching!

Fans of the television show Friends, should remember Joey reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women with Rachel, and expanding to What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the ongoing series from Heidi Eisenberg Murkoff.

Rory of Gilmore Girls is known for her bookishness - “I live in two worlds, one is a world of books." She reads 1984 by George Orwell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – to name only a few of the 300+ titles.

Piper on Orange is the New Black (based on a book by the same name) does prison time reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, and the tome of Anna Karenina at 800 plus pages.

Sawyer from Lost gets lost in a number of books while stranded on the island, from Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume to Watership Down by Richard Adams – saved by the book indeed.

Close to my library heart, The Office, as part of their ‘Finer Things (Book) Club’ featured Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, A Room with a View by E.M. Forster and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, and a library copy (!) of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery had a ‘walk-on’ in an episode.

Our animated friends, Tina on Bob’s Burgers, orders up The Call of the Wild by Jack London, while Lisa Simpson, often found reading, can quote from Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

From the Silver Screen to a Kobo Screen, Scott in Antman and the Wasp reads The Fault in our Stars by John Green; Lena in Annihilation reads The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot; Wendy Torrance reads The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger before “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”; and if you’re getting a dose of nostalgia watching When Harry Met Sally, look for Harry reading The Icarus Agenda by Robert Ludlum.

Feel free to reserve any of these titles I have seen ‘pictured’ from the library today, or ‘capture’ and share with us your own finds while book stalking.