John Green, the American author, has shared the books that shaped his life, from childhood favourites to adult discoveries. His latest novel, Hollywood, Ending, is published by Penguin.
Early Reading and Teenage Influences
Green's earliest thrilling reading memories are of series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. In the highly gendered reading days of the 1980s, he knew those books were for girls, but he devoured them anyway.
His favourite book growing up, besides the girls of The Baby-Sitters Club, was Gary Paulsen's The Island, a story about a boy who discovers a secluded island and ventures there to learn about the natural world.
At 16, Green read Toni Morrison for the first time, consuming The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon in quick succession. He said Morrison helped him see that books were vital and present, showing him that they could transform him, not just transport him.
Writers Who Changed His Mind
As a young person, Kurt Vonnegut had an outsize role in developing Green's values and beliefs. Vonnegut's fundamental humanism inspired him then and still inspires him.
Reading Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh made Green want to write books. He had never encountered a novel before with queer main characters or such a vibrant sense of contemporary youth.
Revisiting and Rereading Classics
In high school, Green found Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye annoying and whiny. Revisiting the story years later, it shattered him; the sadness of the novel and the vulnerability of Holden only became clear to him in adulthood.
Green has just reread Lily King's Heart the Lover and enjoyed it even more the second time. He rereads a lot because he is fascinated by how different a great book is each time you return to it. He does not feel an urgent need to return to the works of Ayn Rand, whose flimsy plots he says only reinforce flawed ideas about how humans organise themselves and cooperate.
Green did not read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice until he was an adult, and he wishes he could have met Lizzy Bennet when he was younger. He is currently reading How to Build a Universe by Dr Katie Mack, about astrophysics, and his comfort read is All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, a novel about US politics and the south and the inexorable march of time.
