Penn Badgley Has Only Read 2 Fiction Books in the Last Decade
Penn Badgley is a well-known actor with an impressive resume. However, he is most known for his two biggest projects, Gossip Girl and Netflix’s You. His characters in both shows loved literature, but Badgley has only read two fiction books in the last decade.
Penn Badgley’s favorite books
Badgley couldn’t be any different from his You character. Despite playing Joe Goldberg flawlessly, Badgley doesn’t share all of Joe’s interests, including reading. In a recent Autocomplete Interview with Wired, Badgley was asked about his favorite books.
“It used to be Kurt Vonnegut, who was my favorite author. I really loved Galapagos, which is not like the one Kurt Vonnegut fans name,” Badgley said. “I’ve read two books of fiction in the last 10 or 11 years,” he added, naming Swing Time by Zadie Smith and Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler as the two novels he’s read in the last decade.
When deciding which of the two he loved most, Badgley said, “I’ll stick with Galapagos, [by] Kurt Vonnegut.” Galapagos was published in 1985 and tells the story of a small band of shipwreck survivors on the Galapagos Islands who become the only group unaffected by a disease that causes infertility.
The book pays tribute to Charles Darwin as the author uses his theory to reach his own conclusions about an evolved species of human beings in the future. Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and follows a young woman with a gift for feeling other people’s pain.
After being displaced, she and the other characters set out for a new home. Along the way, she discovers a new religion that believes its followers are destined to inhabit other planets. Swing Time tells the story of two girls who love to tap dance.
Penn Badgley is known to play literary-minded characters
Gossip Girl shocked fans (and the actors) when it was announced that Badgley’s character Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl, the blogger who’d made a career writing and documenting the lives of those around him. In a way, the signs were there. Dan was a huge literature and film snob.
He saw the world in terms of books and often referenced books in his dialogue. Badgley’s Joe also does the same thing, although he takes things to the furthest extreme. When fans first meet Joe, he works at a quaint bookshop and happens to know almost every book in the establishment, as evidenced by his conversation with Beck.
It is revealed that Joe had always found comfort in books, and growing up under Mr. Mooney’s care helped him understand and appreciate them. Joe is seen to have a talent for restoring even the oldest books, and this skill allows him to send money to Ellie after her sister’s death.
Joe takes his love for books to another level in Season 3, when he finds a job at a library, and in Season 4, when he becomes a professor. He and his students often analyze works written by different authors for their class, where Joe proves he feels most at home.
Penn Badgley’s characters, Joe and Dan, have a lot more in common
Like Joe, Dan finds himself among wealthy individuals, and as a boy from a relatively normal upbringing, he struggles to fit in due to his shyness, although he gets the hang of it in no time. The two also share the “nice guy syndrome,” and those around them, for some reason, always find themselves drawn to both characters.
While Dan’s antics as Gossip Girl don’t result in the murders of his friends and their friends, he is as much a stalker as he followed his friends to obtain information, just like our friendly neighborhood serial killer.
