Required Reading: Six Books That Changed Penn Badgley’s Life

Joe Goldberg, Penn Badgley’s character in the Netflix thriller series You, is a bit of a bibliophile—and Badgley, too, is rather well-read. Unlike Goldberg, though, he doesn’t use literature to help him rationalize murder. Instead, books helped Badgley make sense of the world and the people in it, especially when he was being homeschooled as an aspiring performer. It’s a period of his life that he revisits in Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, a witty and endearing new book that Badgley wrote with Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin, the co-hosts of his podcast Podcrushed.

“Reading has always been the way that I learned the most,” Badgley says over Zoom. The 38-year-old actor has an infant strapped to his chest, which he rocks as he describes his unconventional upbringing—a far cry from the fictional world he once inhabited on Gossip Girl, playing a Brooklynite from an elite high school.

In celebration of Crushmore’s release, here Badgley shares six books that changed his life and helped to shape him as a writer.

Thief of Always by Clive Barker

I definitely read this book when I was nine or 10. It stands alone in a lifetime of literary experiences. I don’t know what I had read and loved before this book, but my memory is that it introduced me to mystery. It introduced me to awe and wonder, and it must have introduced me to horror, because it is a kind of horror genre book for kids, although that’s not my memory of it. My memory of it is just the strangeness, the intensity of it. I was blown away.

It’s funny, because I also remember maybe a sense of dread, which is not what I like when I read or watch something. I’m really not a person who loves the suspense of horror. However, this seems to have done something quite formative. You know, a credit to the book, and it might not sound altogether positive: I think it may have introduced me to existential dread. I’m not kidding. And that is sort of what horror does, right? And this book does it masterfully.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Last night, my five-year-old picked up the entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes that I’ve had sitting around for, like, 15 years, and he wanted me to read it to him at like 4:30 in the morning. His nights right now are so crazy because of the twins. Anyway, I was reading it this morning, and not for nothing, I was like, “This is actually my first formative literary experience.” It’s brilliant. Calvin and Hobbes is definitely my first experience with literate humor, because that is what it is. It’s very wise, it’s very clever. It’s subtle.