John Green: Morrison, Vonnegut, and the books that shaped me — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- John Green says his earliest thrilling reading memories were of Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club in the 1980s, even though, as he puts it, "I knew those books were for girls."
- Green credits reading Toni Morrison at age 16 — The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon in quick succession — with shifting his view of literature from "distant" to "vital and present."
- Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was the book that made Green want to write, the first novel he'd encountered with queer main characters and what he calls "a vibrant sense of contemporary youth."
- Green describes being "shattered" on rereading The Catcher in the Rye as an adult — a reversal from his teenage view of Holden Caulfield as "annoying and whiny" and a privileged "rich kid in New York City."
- Green names Kurt Vonnegut as the novelist who played an "outsize role" in developing his values through a "fundamental humanism" — humans might not yet be good news but still might be.
- He says he could never return to Ayn Rand, whose "flimsy plots" he says only serve to "reinforce flawed ideas about how humans organise themselves and cooperate."
- Green's comfort read is Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a novel about US politics and "the inexorable march of time" he returns to when he needs to be reminded why he loves reading.
Why it matters: Green offers an unusually candid map of the literary influences behind his own writing, and the most striking beat is the reversal: a book he dismissed as a teenager (The Catcher in the Rye) became the one that "shattered" him in adulthood, while a teen discovery (Chabon's novel with queer protagonists) redirected his career toward writing.
Ask SkimNews
