As the world debates the opening episode of Mad Men‘s third season on AMC, online readers can learn how to read read like Don Draper.
The Daily Beast featured a number of classic books that make cameo appearances in the intricate sets on Mad Men. The show has featured “Exodus” by Leon Uris, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, and “The Agony and the Ecstasy” by Irving Stone–a glimpse at the bestseller list from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Book Beast list also includes Draper’s bedside reading, “The Best of Everything” by Rona Jaffe, which opens with this frenetic vision of New York working women in 1958: “You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some them look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their morning beds yet.”