'Lost' Book Club redefines beach reading

If Oprah can use television to encourage people to read classic literature, why can’t Juliet, Ben, and Sawyer? Check out the Lost Book Club (hat tip to EW book maven Thom Geier), a guide to more than 40 books that have been referenced on the series to date. Each book is one that has been used as a prop (like Stephen King’s Carrie, which the Others were reading in their own book club, pictured, on the day Flight 815 crashed into the island), has been referenced in the plot (such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, whose wandering hero Dean Moriarty is Ben’s alias when he checks into a hotel), or whose philosophical underpinnings have been a touchstone for Lost‘s writers (like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time). Each book is cross-referenced to the episode or episodes in which it was referenced, and which you can watch streaming online just a click away. “We can’t promise you any of these books will lead you to answers about Lost,” showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse write in a note to Book Club visitors, “but we can promise you’ll be enriched for having read them.”

Check out the list, then let us know which books on it you’re now inspired to go read, which you’ve read already, and which have most illuminated the mysteries of Lost for you.