‘You’ Season 2 hides its best twists in book symbolism and easter eggs

The following contains major spoilers from a whole bunch of literary classics and Netflix’s You Season 2.

When he’s not elbows-deep in a rotting corpse, Joe Goldberg loves a good book.

In You Season 2, viewers followed Netflix’s foremost word nerd-turned-serial killer as he chased a woman to the City of Angels, and racked up a body count that would make Agatha Christie blush. Along the way, there was stalking, maiming, dismembering, killing, and heaps of classic novels. 

Joe’s love for literature was well-established during his New York days, but in Season 2, You‘s creators took special care in curating the works within Joe’s orbit. When he wasn’t celebrating Bisexual Pescatarian Week at Anavrin or suffering through another Great Gatsby “Old sport!” quip, Joe was slowly unveiling — through the books he was reading — the exquisite twists and turns that would befall him and his victims.

It’s the kind of “wink wink, nudge nudge” fitting of a villain this pompous, and a show audacious enough to name two of its characters (who actually play tennis) “Forty” and “Love.” We’ve flipped back through all 10 episodes of You Season 2 and bookmarked a few of the more notable literary symbols — just in case you skimmed past them.

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s iconic meditation on guilt follows Raskolnikov, a young thief who plots the murder/robbery of a local shop owner. Shortly after the crime, Raskolnikov is plagued with regret, paranoia, and visions of a blonde NYU graduate student who he murdered last season. Oh wait, that’s Joe. 

Crime and Punishment is easily the most overt literary reference made this season, with Joe monologuing about its themes in both the season opener and finale. 

“Dostoevsky wrote, ‘If man has a conscience, he will suffer for his mistake, that will be his punishment as well as his prison,'” narrates Joe, a man with no conscience and no punishment. Here’s hoping this soapy tragedy heads somewhere towards justice, eventually. At least Raskolnikov was sent to literal Siberia, and not the SoCal ‘burbs with what looks like a heated backyard pool.

Joe’s dystopian Insta account

When Joe sets up an Instagram account for his alias Will Bettelheim in Episode 2, he chooses three books to feature: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, and The Power by Naomi Alderman. They’ve got pretty covers, bold graphic designs, aaaand coincidentally three terrifying visions of a dystopian future. 

Watkins imagines a barren California following years of drought that has turned the once buzzing home of Hollywood into a Mad Max-esque cautionary tale. Eagleman speculates on life after death, imagining some truly horrifying fates for humankind. And finally, feminist powerhouse Alderman writes of women gaining the ability to stun men with electrical shocks from their fingers, a sci-fi concept that soon devolves into a terrifying battle of the sexes that includes descriptions of torture and rape. 

TL;DR These books are the reddest flags. Great reads, but Jesus Joe, have ya tried The Royal We?

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Ah, the book Love gives to Joe: fitting, romantic, and arguably the first sign this woman would eventually lock this man in a plexiglass box with the body of his deceased neighbor. 

Didion’s Play It As It Lays tells the story of Maria, a broken woman who moves to Los Angeles (just like Joe) in hopes of beginning a film career (less like Joe) and enters a toxic, tumultuous, and occasionally violent relationship with a man she’s just met (and we’re back to Joe). 

At first, the selection seems like a dark text for Joe and Love, two people with complicated childhoods, to bond over. By the season finale, it’s clear Didion’s work stands as a representation of where the couple is headed — including a complex relationship with their only daughter. 

Everything in the women’s lit display 

Anavrin’s women’s lit display wins the award for most basic selection of women’s literature found outside of a middle school library. 

Time and again, viewers have witnessed Joe’s mind-splitting misogyny as he seeks out the perfect, demure woman, incapable of thoughts beyond motherhood and quiet contentedness. Rife with themes of sexism and inner turmoil, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are a far-cry from this version of a woman, but remain some of the most standard selections in women’s literature. 

Of course, these books are masterful works of art — but considering how much thought Joe puts into all the books he reads written by men, he could have been a bit more creative here. It’s a telling glimpse into the psyche of a guy who, above all else, sucks. 

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

In Episode 3, we get a glimpse at the books Joe keeps in his work locker, presumably light fare fit for perusing between Moon Juice orders and muffin breaks. 

We couldn’t identify the book on the right, but the left one is Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. In Nostromo, the titular character is a good guy who navigates a political crisis before being shot in the head thanks to a case of mistaken identity. 

Sound like anyone you know? Maybe rhymes with Schmorty? It’s fitting that Forty be the one to sneak up on Joe in this scene, and then get misidentified as the bad guy in You‘s bonkers finale.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Today in “Weird Stuff to Give to a 15-year-old Girl,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. 

When Joe and Ellie get to know each other, the pair agree to trade book and movie recommendations. For Ellie’s first suggestion, she gives Joe The Big Sleep, a film noir starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In return, Joe gives her a Russian book about Satan. 

To be fair, The Master and Margarita is satire, ripe with political themes and humor. Still, nothing screams, “Get away from this strange, pasty man!” like the devil giving you a book about the devil. 

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

In You Season 2, Episode 6 (fittingly titled “Farewell, My Bunny”), Joe and Ellie discuss his latest read: Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely — a thrilling tale of betrayal, deceit, hidden identities, and uh… murder in Los Angeles, a topic Joe should be well-versed in considering he’s done it twice by this point in the show. 

Joe’s self-help collection

By Episode 7, Joe has seen better days. Having recently broken things off with Love, the besmocked bookseller shuffles around Anavrin like a dejected schoolboy. When Love smooches her knock-off Hemsworth Milo in the kitchen within Joe’s view, he can be seen sorting through what appears to be some kind of plant section. 

Turns out, the collection is fittingly comprised of self-help books, including Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, and symbolic texts on growth, like Basilius Besler’s Florilegium. Perhaps if Joe had taken some time to skim this relaxing section, instead of having Charlie Barnett’s character stick needles in his face, he wouldn’t have murdered quite so many people. Maybe. 

And the reading selections of the new “you” 

What to make of the woman unfortunate enough to move in next to Joe?

Attracted to mysterious laughter over his backyard fence, Joe spies his neighbor reading next to a stack of books that includes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and the works of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka. It’s unclear what exactly we should make of these texts. Of course, Brave New World is another dystopian novel — not a great sign — but Kafka and Austen could mean anything, and we have no idea what book she is actually holding in the scene. 

This leaves lots of room for the writers of You Season 3 to sort out how they want to turn the page to Joe’s next conquest. We’re just hoping she’s not an English teacher. Good luck, you.