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 up

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