Michelle Obama will be visiting Liberia, Morocco, and Spain this week to promote her Let Girls Learn initiative, but before she left, she needed a little help choosing something to read on the plane. And where there is someone in need of a book, there is Rory Gilmore. Alexis Bledel reprised her role as the Gilmore Girls character and notorious bookworm for a meeting with the First Lady, recommending an entire library’s worth of choices, including such light “beach reads” as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Oh, Rory. How we’ve missed you.)
This moment of worlds colliding actually makes a lot of sense, in-universe: After all, Gilmore Girls ended in 2007 with Rory leaving home to report on Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. There’s even a fun shoutout to junk food connoisseur Lorelai Gilmore when Rory hands the First Lady— who has spent the past eight years championing healthy eating—a box of Pop Tarts, “a gift from my mom.” So what books does the first lady eventually choose? Well, the only ones more addictive than Pop Tarts.
