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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 cohosts 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.
As irreverent as Calvin is, the way Bill Watterson depicts the natural world is so reverent and spiritual and vivid. It adds this whole other dimension to the world of the strip. As a father now, I think the way Bill Watterson captures childhood is actually really, really accurate and smart. It hadn’t occurred to me before revisiting it, but I found that Calvin has an aspect to him that is very lonely. He’s got this incredible imagination, and that’s what you see, so his loneliness is completely hidden. Not only is Hobbes not real, but all the other people that Calvin interacts with are quite antagonistic, in a way, as much as they may also be trying to take care of him. When he gets tender with his parents, it melts me.
Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
I read this the year before the BP oil spill, so that would have been 2009. I must have been filming the second season of Gossip Girl, and it was an era defined politically, for me, by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in its true golden era. So, even though these were the Obama years, I was not content. I think everybody’s coming-of-age politically contains some kind of great disillusionment. I was primed for a change. And there’s something about reading this book, something about the special strain of evil that was the slave trade in the Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, that just made me think, We’ve got no time for fiction. It wasn’t opening my eyes to racism or slavery, but maybe the far-reaching systematization of it, which the entire world profited from, and which has to change a person when truly confronting it. After this book, no fiction could hit hard enough, could strike enough of a chord that felt true. My theory always was, if it feels true and resonates, great. I want to read it. But I can’t actually find a book of fiction that hits as hard as nonfiction does when it’s about something really profound. So this book marked the beginning of a period of search which started out political, then became moral, and then it became spiritual, ultimately leading me to live a different way of life. Part of that was becoming a Baha’i.
I don’t want to overstate what that one book did, because I suppose I was headed there, so it was a marker. The next year would be the BP oil spill, and the next year would be the Arab Spring, and later Occupy Wall Street. A few years later would be Black Lives Matter. I was the right age as a young adult for all of this to be very formative and transformative.
The Hidden Words by Bahá’u’lláh
In the preamble written by Bahá’u’lláh, he says, “This is that which hath descended from the realm of glory, uttered by the tongue of power and might, and revealed unto the Prophets of old. We have taken the inner essence thereof and clothed it in the garment of brevity….” In the same way science reveals to us the truth of physical reality, and its laws and principles, its dynamics, this book reveals those principles and dynamics for the interior of the human being by encapsulating and distilling the essence of true religion.
That is ultimately the purpose of religion, as I understand it. Modern organized religion is a different story, for the most part. But this book does that, and it does it successfully and effectively. I wasn’t a Baha’i before I read this book, and then I went through a period of about three months in early 2015 when I would read it regularly. It’s something you can read in one day. It’s a tiny book, but it’s also incredibly dense, where you could just meditate on a few of the words for a month, if you wanted, or a year, which sometimes I have done. I would read this book every day. I never consciously thought I would become a Baha’i, and lo and behold, this book was one of the things that turned me into one.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
I’d be curious if, in a conversation of panelists who are from diverse backgrounds, they’d say James Baldwin was more meant for white audiences. I suppose he must be, because he’s describing something of the Black experience, and it’s white people who need to hear it most. He does it so effectively that it’s nothing short of spiritual. He was so humane, which should be taken as the highest compliment.
The idea that race is a social construct was not the terminology of either his time or the time when I read it. Now I haven’t read it in so long, but I think what it did for me is help me feel what that might mean, for something to be not real but socially constructed. When you break it down, it’s such a disturbing way of viewing the human being—so unbelievably superficial. This is an incredibly vital issue for the world, but especially for our country, and now more than ever. Baldwin sits in a place that, to me, is completely unique, rarefied, and special. He’s such a powerful writer.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
This one is the one book of fiction I could finish during that period of nearly 20 years that I wasn’t interested in fiction. I think part of the reason that I struggle with fiction is that the author becomes God, the author of reality, of that universe. And the principles of that universe don’t necessarily operate by actual truth; they operate by the author’s understanding of it. The best fiction can sort of bend you to its will, and through it you can see and feel truths that are actually real and universal. But often I feel like, This is just what you think about people, so why should I care? Authors can be brilliantly talented but really ignorant. Brilliance doesn’t necessarily mean they see the world in a way that’s true; it may simply be compelling or seductive. So this one felt to me like post-apocalyptic fiction world-building that’s actually grounded in truth. And not for nothing, I think it’s because the author is, in addition to being a genius, a Black woman. I think that’s important because in a lot of speculative fiction and fantasy, you have these white guys imagining everything. But this one is grounded in truth, and some of the most effective world-building I can recall.
Often in visions of the future, it’s an incredibly cynical view of humanity, where there’s not one shred of hope in there. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is in a really horrible, disintegrating world, yet she has radical hope that’s based on faith and reason.
