Penn Badgley has spent much of his career playing characters who live inside their own heads — but none more book-obsessed than Joe Goldberg, the murderous bookseller at the center of You. Born in Baltimore in 1986, Badgley was just 11 when he and his mother moved to Los Angeles so he could pursue an acting career. He soon began doing voice-overs for children’s radio stations in Hollywood, before catching his break on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. Years later, he’d become best known for playing bookish outsider Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl and sociopathic bibliophile Joe Goldberg on You, a character whose literary tastes are deeply woven into his twisted worldview.
But beyond the fictional shelves of Mooney’s, Badgley has developed a rich and deeply personal reading life of his own. During the awkward years of being homeschooled as an aspiring actor, books became a touchstone for making sense of the world and the people around him. He reflects on that unconventional upbringing in Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, which he co-wrote with his Podcrushed cohosts Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin.
In celebration of its 2025 release, Badgley spoke with Vogue on the books of his life. From the tenderness at the heart of Calvin and Hobbes to the radical hope of Octavia Butler, dive into his reading list below, and check out the bookshelves of other iconic actors here.
Penn Badgley’s Reading List
The 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.” -PB
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
“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.” -PB
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
“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.” -PB
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…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.” -PB
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (also rec’d by Colin Kaepernick, David Bowie, Emily Ratajkowski, Naomi Klein, Richey Edwards & Ta-Nehisi Coates)
“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.” -PB
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (also rec’d by Abbi Jacobson, Gloria Steinem & Noname)
“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? …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.” -PB
(via Vogue; photo by Heather Hazzan)
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