I bet Louis and the guys in that library scene saw what she was reading! But the audience? No, we don’t see what the titles of her books are… but maybe someone recognizes the illustration style in this one, at least, and can tell us? It looks like “Hell and Damnation” is a chapter in it. Maybe it’s a book the props people designed just for the movie, though.

In the movie, Louis says:

“She studied the myths and legends of the Old World, obsessed with the search for what she called ‘our kind’ ”

^So, probably books about those that were available in the US in 1860ish.

Hit the jump for a book!IWTV quote, cut for length.

I can’t find any references to specific titles mentioned in book!IWTV either.

In the book, this is what Louis says about Claudia’s interest in going to Europe, but not that she studied any specific books about it:

“Meantime, she made a plan. It was her idea most definitely that we must go first to central Europe, where the vampire seemed most prevalent. She was certain we could find something there that would instruct us, explain our origins. But she seemed anxious for more than answers: a communion with her own kind. She mentioned this over and over, `My own kind,’ and she said it with a different intonation than I might have used. She made me feel the gulf that separated us. In the first years of our life together, I had thought her like Lestat, imbibing his instinct to kill, though she shared my tastes in everything else. Now I knew her to be less human than either of us, less human than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception bound her to the sympathies of human existence. Perhaps this explained why – despite everything I had done or failed to do – she clung to me. I was not her own kind. Merely the closest thing to it.”