Some More Turn Up the Heat Inspo

13 July 2026

Possibly this is the trickiest challenge from the Turn Up the Heat score card this year. Can you remember the books you have seen a screen character reading or spotted on their bookshelf? If that’s not going to work for you, you can always read a book that has been adapted for television or a movie. But taking the challenge literally, a book spotted in a TV series or movie means just that – a book that’s been a prop in either a film or TV show.

If you’ve ever watched The Gilmore Girls, chances are you’ll have had a walk through the greats of classic literature, courtesy of Rory, the girl whose always got her head in a book. You can catch the full list of 300+ books on GoodReads. A few books crop up on the comedy series Ted Lasso too.

We’ve made a handy booklist of some of these titles, which you can pick up at your nearest library, or access via the library website. Here are a few highlights.

If you’d like to fit in a classic novel for Turn Up the Heat, there’s E M Forster’s A Room with a View both spotted on a TV show as well as a book made into a movie. It’s a delightful story full of amusing characters, a plot that tracks the difficult path to love, and wonderful settings that include Tuscany, which for heroine Lucy Honeychurch becomes a place of cultural and romantic awakening.

A more modern favourite is The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, another problematic romance following Clare and her husband Henry who suffers from Chrono-Displacement Disorder. This means his genetic clock suddenly resets itself shunting him either forward or back in time. His time-travellling adventures are at times humorous, at others harrowing.

Or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a fantasy novel about Shadow, who days before his prison release, learns of his wife’s death in a car accident. With nothing else to lose he agrees to make a strange journey across America with the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, while around them a storm is brewing.

If non-fiction is more your thing, Wild: a journey from lost to found by Cheryl Strayed is a real-life story about someone else with nothing left to lose. Cheryl decides to walk eleven hundred miles alone through the west coast of America. It’s a brutal survival memoir, describing Strayed’s epic long-distance hike and how it gave her the sense of redemption and healing she so badly needed.

Perhaps you’ll revisit a children’s favourite. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle is a ground-breaking story that won the Newbery Medal in 1963. When Meg’s father disappears during a secret assignment for the government, she is desperate to find him. With her brother Charlie and friend Calvin, the search will involve travel through space and time with the help of three astral travellers.

A couple of Young Adult books make the list too, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. This coming-of-age story follows freshman Charlie, who is happy to watch life from the sidelines until a couple of charismatic senior students take him under their wing. The novel is told in letters to an unknown correspondent and has also been made into a film.

Whatever book you select, we hope it is an enjoyable read as well as helping you complete your Turn Up the Heat scorecard.

Posted by JAM

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