Listen to the First Episode of the Book Maven Podcast

Surprise! The first episode is LIVE.

I just couldn’t wait to share this inaugural episode with you all. It’s been over a decade of #FridayReads (first launched in 2009 — oh boy), which means it’s been over a decade of connecting with you over the stories that fulfill us. I am so proud to expand this community and share our favorite books. Whether you’re a voracious reader, a hungry writer, or an industry insider, you’ll find a new title to check out—I promise!

Books On Tap

In this first episode, I sit down with A.J. Jacobs to discuss his book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, and the dangers of living by potentially outdated texts. 

#FridayReads

Shout out to the following Friday Readers: The Feminist Press, Chris Bohjalian, the Alabama Booksmith, the Penguin Random House Library, and David Lawson. Thank you for sharing your reads with us!

Tell me what you’re reading on X, Threads, or comment on this post.

Pop! Goes the Culture

If there's a literary work that has been adapted into more forms than Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, well it must be Winnie the Pooh. In this segment, I review the many versions of one of literature’s most scandalous titles.

Six Recs

Titles include Family Meal by Brian Washington, The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott, The Gathering by Anne Enright, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Real Americans by Rachel Kong, and Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue.

All titles mentioned in this episode:

1. Stanley Kubrick's Lolita film (1962)

2. Adrian Lyne's Lolita film (1997)

3. Rodion Shchedrin's Lolita opera (1994)

4. John Harbison's Lolita opera (1999, abandoned in 2005)

5. Lolita ballet, choreographed by David Bomba (2003, staged by Grand Ballet de Genève)

6. Richard Nelson's One Man Show (2009, staged in London)

7. Edward Albee's Lolita play adaptation (1981)

8. Umberto Eco's Granita (1959)

9. Jean Kerr's humorous piece in Ladies Home Journal (1959)

10. Steve Martin's Lolita at 50 (1999)

11. Sam Mendes’ American Beauty film (1999)

12. A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll

13. The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger

14. Baumgartner by Paul Auster

15. The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

16. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

17. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

18. At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón

19. Ours by Phillip B. Williams

20. Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

21. Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

22. Real Americans by Rachel Kong

23. Family Meal by Bryan Washington

24. The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott

25. The Gathering by Anne Enright

26. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Thank you so much for being part of this readerly community. Share your #FridayReads on X, Threads, or Substack!

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

Episode Transcript:

Hello readers, welcome to my new show, The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This is a podcast where we'll dive into the hottest book world trends, address some of the great, or not so great classics, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, I recently talked with A.J. Jacobs, whose follow up to The Year of Living Biblically is about living constitutionally. Central to The Year of Living Constitutionally is the question, is the Constitution a living document or is it fixed in the time it was written? Here's a section of the conversation we had about the pros and cons of living by potentially outdated texts.

BP: “So, what is the most important thing you have learned in the 20 years since our first interview?”

AJ: “Wow, what a great question. Well, that's a tough one, but I'm gonna have to go with gratitude. My default mode is the Larry David mindset. Very cranky and …”

BP: “It is not! You're no Larry David! Alright, keep going.” 

AJ: “Well, I hide it well, that's why. And I work really hard at getting over it. Because, yeah, I feel that we all have our Larry David side and our Fred Rogers side, Mr. Rogers side. So my career and my life have been a lot about trying to build up the Mr. Rogers side and weaken the Larry David. I like watching Larry David, but being inside that mindset, that's not fun.

So I have been working and each one of my books, there can be, there's a theme of gratitude. One was about gratitude when I went and thanked a thousand people for my cup of coffee. And this new book has gratitude, everything from I'm grateful to elastic socks, the elastic in my socks, because I was wearing 18th century clothing and you had to put on these tiny belts around your socks every morning, not even garters, they're like proto garters, and I'm grateful for democracy, and I want to celebrate it more, and remind people that it is a gift and it might go away if we don't pay attention.”

BP: “So funny to see you with a tricorn hat and then the ear, the earbuds coming down. It's like, no, those are not laces. Those are actually an Apple product. That's a perfect. Perfectly anachronistic.”

AJ: “Exactly. That's right. I've got a little 21st century, a little 18th century and you mix it together and see what comes out.”

BP: “Now, I've talked to you on previous books and I've read previous things. Was it a light bulb moment or more of a tallow based candle moment?”

AJ: “Ha ha ha. Love it. It was a series of tallow based moments, so it wasn't just one tallow candle lighting up. And by the way, I did use some tallow candles, and they are, they got a little, um they're a little rank.”

BP: “I was going to say a little fragrant, kind of like visiting Ireland and smelling a peat fire.”

AJ: “My wife said it smelled like meatloaf, like, left out for 3 days because they're made of beef beef tallow. So I actually had the idea a long time ago. Because, as you know, I wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically, where I tried to do, to understand the Bible by living as if, by, by following the rules as literally as possible and trying to get in the mindset of our, uh, ancestors.

And for this one, I had always thought that there were so many parallels between the Bible and the Constitution, the way we look at it, the way it guides our lives, and the way there are two different groups. Some say you've got to look at the meaning of the original words, and it's sort of fixed in time.

And the other group who says, no, the meaning evolves, you have to, it evolves with time and you have to wrestle with it. And so you have that with the Bible, with religious people, and you have that with the Constitution, with the originalist versus the living constitutionalist. So I'm like, this is a sequel, and I, I'd always thought, considered doing it, but then two years ago, the originalists, uh, became a majority on the Supreme Court.

And there were these bunch of decisions that had a huge impact on my life, on millions of American lives. And I said, okay, now is the time. It's urgent. I need to understand the Constitution and how to interpret it. So I'm going to go all in and live, time travel to the 18th century.”

BP: “Did you deliberately decide ‘I'm going to have this book finished in time for the 2024 election cycle’?”

AJ: “I didn't decide that, but my publisher sure did. Uh, it was a fascinating year, but it was, I was working from dawn till dusk by, and, uh…”

BP: “From first light to, um, you know, the golden hour because …” 

AJ: “Yeah, exactly.:

BP: “Of course, those tallow candles don't help much in the middle of the night.” 

AJ: “Right. Well, I did write a lot of it by candlelight. Yeah, I was burning the midnight tallow, I guess.” 

BP: “Oh, God!”

AJ: “Because, yeah, I had to, you know, Live it and research it and interview and go on adventures all in a year. So when it says a year of living constitutionally, it wasn't like what I usually do, which is a year living it and then writing it. It was a year living and writing.”

BP: “One of the things that I do want to make sure we get back to is what you were speaking about a few minutes ago, AJ. In the idea of the originalists versus the people who think, you know, change is good. And so why do you think the originalists are so loyal to one document when most of them probably don't even have their original library cards.

You know? I mean, archiving is important. I have my original library card. You know, you talk about fetishizing the document, do we fetishize the Constitution and do we fetishize our rights sometimes?” 

AJ: “Well, yes, there's a lot there. So let me start by saying, well, let me start with your last part where we fetishize our rights.

Um, one of the takeaways from this was I love individual rights. And of course that is a huge part of America. But back in the 1700s, they also thought a lot about your responsibility, your duty, your civic duty, and whether that was being on the bucket brigade and putting out a fire or being in the militia, if you were an adult male.

Now, I don't want to go back to militias. And I don't want to go back to the 18th century at all because it was sexist and racist. But, this sense of responsibility to your community, your country, your world, that is something I would like to recapture in terms of… I guess your question about originalists.

I try to understand why, what the appeal of originalism is. And I do get it. I do get it. The fear is that if you don't stick to the text, then it's chaos. Then anyone can interpret the constitution to mean whatever they want. And that judges will have too much power. And that the Constitution, they say, think of it like a contract, like, you make a contract to redo your bathroom and the contractor all of a sudden says, okay, well, I put a…”

BP: “An amendment!”

AJ: “Yeah, well, I put a, like, you know, I put a bed in the bathroom just because I decided to. “And you say, well, that wasn't in the contract. If you want to change the contract, there are ways to do that. So that is the fear with the Constitution. And, just to strong steel man them a little more, just to give a little more fair point of view of the originalists, they aren't totally frozen in the past. 

They will say that the Constitution's principles remain the same, but the applications can differ. So when they say no search and seizure at first that meant no constables banging down your door. Now it can apply to the iPhone. However, they're very, they are less flexible when it comes to evolving morals.

So what, when you have something like gay rights, someone who is a living constitutionalist will say, ‘We have to evolve the moral so that equal protection covers gay rights’, even though that wasn't the original meaning of those words in the Constitution. So I am definitely more on the side of, we need to evolve.

And I actually think It's more of an originalist position to be in favor of evolving the meaning, because I think these founding fathers were the best of them. They were very entrepreneurial, very flexible and forward thinking. So they, I think if they were around today, they would probably, many of them, be on the side of living constitutionalism.”

BP: “Learning about documents like the Constitution, learning about the process of our government seemed to be something that was very important in public education, you know, at a certain time in the 20th century. What do you think is important? What's the best way to teach younger people, even younger than your kids now about all of this? Because yes, reading a book like this can be a gateway drug, but you know, what kinds of things should we be learning about in sixth grade social studies?” 

AJ: “That is a great question. Well, I do think that what I did is more appealing than just reading a book. You are trying to live it. So having them set up a constitutional convention where they debate some of these issues.

One of the many important lessons, I think, for kids is that there are some people who say the Constitution is a sacred document, it's perfect just the way it is. And then there are others who say it was made by a slavocracy and it has no relevance to our lives and I understand both. But the truth is it contains elements of good and bad.

It contains wonderful, inspiring passages that planted the seeds for equality and what America at its best is. And it also had elements of oligarchy. So you want kids to understand that, it is not all one thing, it is not a monolith. It contains different parts and we have to focus, hopefully they will focus, on the good parts and try to make the country better and not just completely give up.”

BP: “This is something from your last chapter about the takeaways. I think you talked about which rights have to be absolute rights. What can the Constitution as it is teach us about best practices for diversity, you know, inclusion and equal opportunity? 

Yeah, it's a great question. I have a chapter where I talk about Frederick Douglass and how he saw the Constitution. And at the time before the Civil War there was, there were two… the two most famous abolitionists were William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. And William Lloyd Garrison, who was white, said he believed the Constitution was a pact with the devil. Because it did not forbid slavery, it allowed it to continue.

So he literally burned the Constitution in front of crowds to show what he thought of it. At first, Frederick Douglass was on his side and believed that this was the way to treat the Constitution. But somewhere in the 1850s, Frederick Douglass changed his mind. And this is Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved man who became a great orator.

He instead, decided to see the Constitution as a promissory note, meaning it was, it promised things like equality and liberty, but it was not delivering on them. So he said, we have to make America live up to the promises that are in the Constitution. The Constitution has planted the seeds of freedom, but we are the ones who have to fight to make it grow and live up to its best parts.

And that to me is very inspiring. That is the point of view. I have like, let's, let's keep fighting to have the constitution live up to its best parts. And it has, we have made progress over the years and you can see it in the amendments with the expansion of voting to Black people, to men, um, to women, to indigenous people.”

BP: “I like that ‘to men’ that that was a good Freudian slip there.” 

AJ: “Yeah, we didn't know we weren't banned from the, we didn't have too much trouble at the start. But yes, so, so anyway, that to me is a good lesson. Like, um, we don't have to throw the Constitution away. Instead, we can use it as a tool to make America better.”

BP: “Once again, that was A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Constitutionally. You can find it at any store where you get your books. So now that we've talked about some work I've been engaging with, let's see what you all have been reading in our segment on Friday Reads. 

It's time for us to highlight some of last week's great Friday Reads posts. In case you don't know, Friday Reads happens all over social media, and I created the meme back in 2009. It's a fun, easy way to share what you're reading, and get ideas for new books to add to your TBR pile. So, I'm here with my producer Jordan to talk about some of these tweets.

So what do we have, Jordan?” 

JA: “All right, up first we've got from Feminist Press, ‘Happy Friday Reads! What are you reading today?’ And they've got a picture of A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll.” 

BP: “Big shout out to Feminist Press and also shout out to the graphic novels from First Second. They're always so good. It's a great, great choice. And by the way, Jordan, are we still allowed to call them tweets?”

JA: “I don't know, I guess we just call them exes now? I don't know.”

BP: “I don't know! But let’s on to the next ex!” 

JA: “Alright next from Chris Bohjalian, a reread on audio, as a baseball fan, periodically I return to this classic by the late Jim Booton.

I am also reading the new novel by the wonderful novelist Lisa Unger, and that's a picture of The New Couple in 5B. 

BP: “First of all, I want to say this is amazing that even really famous authors like Chris love Friday Reads and use it frequently. He usually puts up his Friday Reads to give colleagues a lift, as he does here. Lisa Ungers, The New Couple in 5B, is getting a lot of great buzz and reviews. So I want to say that's an excellent one. And of course, I also had to choose this, Jordan because of the baseball connection for you. 

JA: “Oh yeah. Always love to hear from a fellow baseball fan. All right. Next we've got from the Alabama Booksmith.

They say, ‘What are your Friday reads’?’ And they've got a picture of a few books. They've got Baumgartner by Paul Auster, The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, and At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón.” 

BP: “The Alabama Booksmith is in Homewood, Alabama. Want to give them a shout out for a great stack of recent fiction. And a couple of those, I definitely want to read Baumgartner. I definitely want to recommend the Tommy Orange.” 

JA: “All right, now I've got from the Penguin Random House Library, ‘This week's Friday Reads pick is Ours by Phillip B. Williams, from a writer of singular voice and vision, a mesmerizing epic that reimagines the past to explore the true nature of freedom. Read with our first look book club’, and they've got a nice little graphic for the book. 

BP: “How cool is it that the Penguin Random House Library Marketing Department has created its own Friday Reads graphic for an amazing title that they have published and should be very proud of, which is Ours by Phillip B. Williams. I am thrilled by that.”

JA: “Alright, finally we've got from David Lawson ‘Hashtag Friday Reads. As someone who hosts a storytelling open mic, I love Irby writing her very own storytelling open mic into her TV pilot. Irby had me laughing about porn genres, sincere Dave Matthews band love, and how bladder control issues can intersect with a piss play fetish.

Wow, I never thought I'd be saying that on a podcast.”

BP: “You know, this is about Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby. Samantha Irby is definitely I won't say she's an acquired taste. She's just, you know what, if you read her, it's immediate and you love her. So it's not acquired. It's love it or hate it. But she is incredibly talented. She also does a lot of screenwriting and those are definitely some words like, zooh my God, who knows what's going to show up in a Friday Reads post?

So no matter where you like to share your own Friday Reads, you could wind up featured in this segment sometime because reading is better when shared. So thank you all for being unwitting participants in this segment. And Jordan, I'm looking forward to our next round.”

Okay, so that's what you all have been reading, and here's what I've been thinking about a lot. Ever notice how the books we love wind up in the media we love. Or hate. Let's break that down in our segment Pop Goes the Culture.

Ballet, opera, film, musical, parody, poetry. If there's a literary work that has been adapted into more forms than Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, well it must be Winnie the Pooh. Oh, bother. I mean, they still haven't made a Disney movie of Lolita. Although, don't get me started on a rant about how too many Disney movie princesses really are just animated versions of Lolita, because then we'll probably come to blows.

I'll start with the facts. Nabokov wrote Lolita in 1955 about, here's a word to make you shudder, hebephilia, or an adult's obsession with children in early adolescence. BRB need to take an everything shower now. Nabokov's main character, Humbert Humbert, is a French literature professor who becomes obsessed with a 12 year old girl named Dolores Hayes.

Lolita, it seems, is a Spanish diminutive for Dolores. A French professor couldn't find the French equivalent? From my first reading of the novel, when I was about 15, I've been skeptical. I don't care how elaborate a frame the novel has. I don't care how beautiful its sentences are. I don't care how experimental Nabokov is.

It's a book about an adult who bribes a child for sexual acts. Don't call them favors. That word doesn't work when you're talking about a child. Oh, it's so erotic. There's so much longing. Can we all just take a step back and admit it's effing sorted? I have a lot of fine literature to read, and that includes truly erotic novels about consenting adult hookups, but I'll take my own step back and consider the amount of time and effort spent on a horrible creep rescuing a young girl from the clutches of another horrible creep.

Team Humbert Humbert meet Team Claire Quilty. You might be equally matched.

On to the adaptations. I'm going to divide them into three categories. Category one, Major Takes. Stanley Kubrick, no surprise there, made the first Lolita film in 1962. The hit single from the soundtrack is ‘Lolita Ya Ya’. The less said about it, the better.

The 1994 opera, written by Rodion Shchedrin and staged at the Swedish Royal Opera House, was considered well staged, but monotonous. Could that have had something to do with its four hour runtime? In 2003, a ballet was choreographed by David Bomba using music by Shostakovich and others, and it was staged in Switzerland by the Grand Ballet de Genève.

I also must mention 2009's One Man Show, created by Richard Nelson, staged in London, with Humbert Humbert played by Brian Cox. 

Fuck off! Professor Humbert, a major gentleman who moved in two weeks ago! 

Category two, Major Flops. The 1971 musical, yes, you heard correctly, a musical of Lolita, closed before it opened in New York. It was praised for sensitively translating the story to the stage.

Famed playwright Edward Albee adapted the novel into a play in 1981. But the production was such a fiasco that Albee savaged it himself along with his critics. Another Lolita opera? What a treat! John Harbison's 1999 attempt to finish this masterwork was abandoned in 2005 as the Boston Roman Catholic clergy child abuse scandal came to light.

Maybe watch Spotlight instead. A 2003 stage adaptation by Michael West attempted Lolita as Commedia dell'arte. One critic wrote that it emphasizes Lolita's role as initiator and normalizes child sexual views. 

Category three, Keeping it Real. Umberto Eco's Granita, a 1959 parody of Lolita, presents Umberto Umberto as obsessed with an elderly woman, Granita.

Ladies Home Journal once had a column called Can This Marriage Be Saved? And in 1959, humorous Jean Kerr wrote, ‘Can This Romance Be Saved’? Lolita and Humbert Consult a marriage counselor. Steve Martin's ‘Lolita at 50’ is a story in his 1999 collection, Pure Drivel, that looks at how Lolita, having learned to seduce, might have gone through multiple marriages.

American Beauty, a 1999 movie starring Mena Sovari and Kevin Spacey, has long been noted for its nods to Lolita, especially in its cheerleading scene.

Let me end by talking about two books that recall Nabokov's to great effect and in service of women and girls everywhere. Azar Nafisi's powerful 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, has the scholar author hosting an educational book club in her home during the most deeply restricted years of Islamic Iran.

She discusses Lolita as a metaphor for life in a fundamentalist police state, in which a regime imposes its own dreams upon citizens reality, much as Humbert does with Lolita, who really is a child. Since the ‘Me Too’ movement gained traction, we've seen a number of novels about toxic student teacher relationships.

But one that stands out for me is 2020's My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, in which a private school student named Vanessa Y has an English teacher who actually gives her a copy of Lolita before sexually abusing her. Russell dedicates her novel to the real life Dolores Hazes’ and Vanessa Wise, whose stories have not yet been heard, believed, or understood.

This week, I wanted to give some new takes on American family sagas, and I have got six books that I loved. So I will tell you about each of them and hope that you might love one or two of them as well. And what happens if I go over time? 

Well, unfortunately a giant bookcase full of books will fall over and spread across the floor.

Oh, no. And then I have to reorganize them. I'm not going to do it by color. I just can't. I can't take that. But in any case, let me get started. Um, is the clock ticking? 

It's going!

Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers is set in New York city during the 2008 financial crisis. So Jende Janga and his wife Nene are from Cameroon and he's working as a chauffeur, she's struggling to find a job. And as the economic downturn gets worse, they have financial hardships and are trying to care for their son in a foreign country. So it explores immigration, family, and the American dream. And shows us a family trying to make a better life for themselves. We're all immigrants, after all.

Rachel Kong's Real Americans, which came out in 2024, explores the complexities of identity and belonging, too, in a rapidly changing United States. The Lee family emigrated from Vietnam in the 1970s, and they had to look at questions of assimilation and the meaning of being American, so it highlights their struggles in a really interesting way. It's got lots of people, lots of characters, and I just think it's one of the best books of this year, so definitely worth taking a look at. 

Family Meal by Brian Washington is the second novel from this really terrific queer author, and it has some characters from his first novel, Memorial. Basically, Cam is sort of gone into hedonism after the death of his partner, Kai. And so an old childhood friend, TJ comes back into his world and they've got these different people narrating. And that includes Kai from beyond the grave as a ghost. But all three of them are very, very unhappy. And it is all about finding the way out of grief and finding a way to, you know, bring a family together when it's not a traditional kind of family. I really love Washington's writing and I hope you will too. 

Very different take on African American families is Rion Amilcar Scott's The World Doesn't Require You, which is actually a collection of short stories, but they're linked, and they're set in an imaginary place in Maryland, and it follows a family struggling to navigate different kinds of challenges, but with a lot of magical realism. And it's very, very funny in a lot of parts, but also very, very sad. It acknowledges all of the hardships that have gone on for African Americans in both North and South, although it's set in a near future contemporary place. 

Anne Enright's The Gathering brings us across the Atlantic to Ireland. Many of her novels are about family and in this case, we've got a very dysfunctional group of Irish people who are reuning if you will, after the death of their mother. There are five siblings. They gather at their childhood home and they've got some unresolved issues. And there's a very, very big unresolved issue that you don't really understand until the very end. It's a bleak novel, but quite beautiful and quite truthful. Highly recommend. I highly recommend all of these, obviously.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett is once again, set in the United States, and it's about another dysfunctional family and their relationship to a grand old house. So you've got a wealthy family, the Van Der Waerds, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, please forgive me. They live in a magnificent Dutch colonial place, and as their children grow up, they witness the marriage of the parents unraveling and the house becomes one of those push me pull you inheritances, but there are other children also who have a relationship to the house and it's really a fairy tale. It's a literary fiction fairy tale about what tears families apart and what holds them together.

So six recs on families. Jordan? 

We came in here at about four minutes and 27 seconds. So cue the bookshelf. 

Oh, well, stay tuned for another edition of six recs soon. But in the meantime, what new releases are you excited about? What are you reading right now? Backlist? Front list? In between list? I will be back next week with some more picks, and thanks so much for listening, Happy reading!

Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Book Maven. ‘The Book Maven: A Literary Review’, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's also produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.