John Green: ‘I devoured the Sweet Valley High books in the 1980s’

My earliest reading memory
I remember learning to read with dull stories about Jane going up a hill, but my 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, I knew those books were for girls, but I  devoured them.

My favourite book growing up
Besides the girls of The Baby-Sitters Club, I loved books about survival and perseverance, especially Gary Paulsen’s The Island, in which a boy discovers a secluded island and ventures there to learn about the natural world.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 16, I read Toni Morrison for the first time: The Bluest Eye and Sula and Song of Solomon in quick succession. Literature had always felt a little distant (and maybe even slightly dead) to me, but Morrison helped me see that books were vital and present. I’d always known that they could transport me, but Morrison showed me that books could also transform me.

The writer who changed my mind
As a young person, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut had an outsize role in developing my values and beliefs. His fundamental humanism – his belief that humans might not yet be good news but still might be good news – inspired me then and inspires me still.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Reading Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh made me want to write books. I’d never encountered a novel before with queer main characters or such a vibrant sense of contemporary youth, and this one made me want to tell similar stories.

The book I came back to
When I was in high school, I found Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye annoying and whiny. I enjoyed the book but thought Holden just needed to snap out of it and realise how lucky he was to be a rich kid in New York City. Revisiting the story years later, it shattered me. The sadness of that novel, and the vulnerability of Holden, only became clear to me in adulthood.

The book I reread
I’ve just reread Lily King’s Heart the Lover and enjoyed it even more the second time around. I reread quite a lot, because I am fascinated by how different a great book is each time you return to it. The text hasn’t changed, of course, but I have.

The book I could never read again
I don’t feel an urgent need to return to the works of Ayn Rand, whose flimsy plots only serve to reinforce flawed ideas about how humans organise themselves and cooperate.

The book I discovered later in life
I didn’t read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice until I was an adult! How I wish I could have met Lizzy Bennet when I was younger, but even so, I love that book and return to it often.

The book I am currently reading
It’s about astrophysics, called How to Build a Universe, by Dr Katie Mack. I’m anxious for anything that can help me zoom out – in this case way, way out – to understand that mine is not the only life (and, indeed, my galaxy is not the only galaxy).

My comfort read
When I need to be reminded of why I love reading and what it is about language that lights me up, I go back to All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, a brilliant novel about US politics and the south but most of all about the inexorable march of time.