Six friends, one coffeehouse and ten seasons of NBC's Thursday nights. Hardly anyone on this show reads, which makes every book that does turn up a character note. Joey keeps The Shining in the freezer and Chandler hides Chicken Soup for the Soul under a couch with no back. David Crane and Marta Kauffman's writers used a paperback the way they used a pause before a punchline.
Built on the lists Book Riot and Quirk Books kept first.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in S1 E1? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Ross is at Carol and Susan's hunting for a skull he has to return to the museum when he picks up Yertle the Turtle and calls it a classic. Susan says she's reading it to the baby, who hasn't been born yet. Ross thinks that's crazy right up until he realizes the baby might learn her voice and not his. He's talking to Carol's stomach by the end of the episode.
Rachel's pick in the swap is the one book she admits to reading more than once, and Joey gets hooked at Central Perk. Joey gives away a chunk of The Shining by accident. Rachel answers on purpose with Laurie and Jo, then finishes him off with Beth dies. Ross calls it ruining the first book Joey ever loved that didn't star Jack Nicholson. By the closing scene Beth is very sick and Little Women goes in the freezer too.
Rachel opens Joey's freezer looking for ice and finds a copy of The Shining. Joey rereads it all the time, and when it gets too scary the book goes on ice, because a cold book is a safer book. He won't even start it without checking there's room in the freezer first. Rachel calls Little Women a classic, Joey bets his book beats hers, and the swap is on.
Ross brings Bonnie to the beach weekend, and Rachel skips the swim to read on the porch. Book Riot has Joan Didion in her hands. Bonnie comes back from the water, and before long Rachel has talked her into shaving her head. Quiet reading, loud results.
Chandler tracks down an early edition of Kathy's favorite childhood book, then hands it to Joey to give her, since she's Joey's girlfriend. Rachel recognizes it on sight and gets told her fingers have destructive oils. Joey delivers it with a line about rabbits and cheese, and Kathy works out who actually picked it. Nothing says I'm not in love with my roommate's girlfriend like calling the author's grandkids.
Phoebe signs up for a literature class at the New School and walks into Central Perk with her nose in Wuthering Heights. Rachel tags along without doing the reading and repeats Phoebe's take in class to the teacher's delight. For Jane Eyre she admits she accidentally read Vogue instead, so Phoebe tells her Jane is a cyborg. Rachel opens with how far ahead of its time the book was, which, to be fair, it was.
Chandler can't cry, and Monica starts to wonder if he's dead inside. His fix is to read Chicken Soup for the Soul in private and hope one of the stories gets him there. When Monica walks in he throws it under the couch, which has no back, so the book slides straight out into the kitchen. The man built a personality on irony and the furniture still ratted him out.
In the cold open of S8E9, Joey Tribbiani reads Rachel's copy and tells her pregnancy swells fingers to twice their size for good. Rachel panics and grabs the book to check, then throws it at him in disgust while he laughs that she falls for it every time. Joey has read exactly enough to be dangerous.
Joey forgets a present for Emma's first birthday, so he promises a dramatic reading and grabs the nearest book. The first one is about coping with postpartum depression. The second is Love You Forever, read from the title page down to Printed in Mexico, and by the last page Rachel is in tears. The man was born to do audiobooks and nobody told him.
