{"id":224235,"date":"2025-10-14T15:03:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/224235\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T15:03:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:03:11","slug":"required-reading-six-books-that-changed-penn-badgleys-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/224235\/","title":{"rendered":"Required Reading: Six Books That Changed Penn Badgley\u2019s Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Goldberg, Penn Badgley\u2019s character in the Netflix thriller series You, is a bit of a bibliophile\u2014and Badgley, too, is rather well-read. Unlike Goldberg, though, he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s a period of his life that he revisits in Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age<\/a>, a witty and endearing new book that Badgley wrote with Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin, the co-hosts of his podcast Podcrushed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cReading has always been the way that I learned the most,\u201d 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\u2014a far cry from the fictional world he once inhabited on Gossip Girl, playing a Brooklynite from an elite high school.<\/p>\n

In celebration of Crushmore\u2019s release, here Badgley shares six books that changed his life and helped to shape him as a writer.<\/p>\n

Thief of Always by Clive Barker\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I definitely read this book when I was nine or 10. It stands alone in a lifetime of literary experiences. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s not my memory of it. My memory of it is just the strangeness, the intensity of it. I was blown away.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny, because I also remember maybe a sense of dread, which is not what I like when I read or watch something. I\u2019m 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\u2019m not kidding. And that is sort of what horror does, right? And this book does it masterfully.<\/p>\n

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last night, my five-year-old picked up the entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes that I\u2019ve 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, \u201cThis is actually my first formative literary experience.\u201d It\u2019s brilliant. Calvin and Hobbes is definitely my first experience with literate humor, because that is what it is. It\u2019s very wise, it\u2019s very clever. It\u2019s subtle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joe Goldberg, Penn Badgley\u2019s character in the Netflix thriller series You, is a bit of a bibliophile\u2014and Badgley,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,65280],"class_list":["post-224235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-required-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}